Confession time
by Volker Weber
You do remember my question about redirecting a domain to a mailbox, don't you? Here is the background. I have been asked this question by a friend, who has been working with Notes since the 3.x time frame. He has extended knowledge of hosting lots of Domino servers for many, many years and customers.
We were both looking for a server-side rule, which would allow to do just that in a single sweep. Independently we came to the same solution as Olaf. And we both did not like it, since (a) it attacks the task from a Notes angle where it is only an SMTP task and (b) filters inside databases are not as rock solid as they should be. We both also knew that we could easily solve the problem at the front end SMTP server, but that server is not under his control. Time to get fresh ideas. So I posted the question to this site.
Have you ever tried to get help solving a Linux problem? Small piece of advice: Don't ask "how can this be done with Linux". Instead just say "Linux can't do this". People will fall all over themselves trying to prove you wrong.
So, here is my confession: I did ask "how can this be done with Domino", but then I switched to "Domino can't do this". And boy, did this work. :-) Eric Parsons writes:
I appreciate Volker's style of analysing and either supporting or refuting the idea. He seems to have the talent of attacking the idea, not the person offering it.
I certainly hope that nobody felt offended. It was a great discussion. And I have come to the conclusion that the cleanest solution is still at the DNS/SMTP level before the message hits the Domino server.
Comments
And FWIW, I agree with your conclusion 100%.
In that case, I'm glad that my first statement was that you couldn't really do it - out of the box at least :O)
@Ben - also my first statement ;-)
The existing Mailrule Engine must be extended to SMPT Events in a future Domino version 7.x to take control about SMPT Connection.
The extension manager api has already been extended in R6 to control SMTP connection, therefore 3rd Party Solution or your own c-api task could solve this issues in the meantime.
actualy i would agree, that it would be most clever to handle it outside domino. However, if you must do it from Domino, there is another solution, which has not been sugested so far:
1. create a dummy user in domino directory
2. enable mail forwarding for that user in the person document
3. in configuration document of the server enable mail journaling,
set the journaling Method to "send to the mail-in database" and
select the dummy user as a target, and exclude all the fields from
the encrytion list (actually, dont know if a * would work)
4. create a new server side rule for "all documents" being
journaled
that way the router do all the work, no need of a c-api or doing stuff inside of a database.
Certainly no offense in this camp, Volker. I'm serious, you're somewhat refreshing how you can keep the discussion going, while not degrading it to namecalling.
I still think we may be splitting hairs on the foreign domain. (And we both have few of those to spare.) I didn't come up with that idea, but I knew the name of it. (woo hoo! I get the Director of the Mundane job.)
I kinda figured you had something up your sleeve on that. Strange request. Had to be a strange reason.
Cheers.
Sidenote: doing "SMTP on the SMTP level" (eg. not inside Domino) brings a few other advantages, such as very simple and robust spam filtering and virus filtering setups, and so on…
