On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 11:50:42AM -0600, Robert Lopez wrote:
It is now proposed that certain staff members should be allowed to be at some remote location and compose an email which will be sent to SOMETHING at our college which will then cause two things to happen.
First, the From: information and Reply-To: information will be re-written from what ever they may be to become that person's college email address.
Second, the email will then be routed to an intended recipient be it within our community or outside of our community.
Well, this is all stuff which happens on receipt of mail to SOMETHING@yourcollege. The best place to do this is in the MTA. Postfix might be able to do this; exim definitely can (it's the Swiss army knife of MTAs :-). Certainly any header and envelope rewriting you want can be done, and it can be database-driven.
But have you thought, how is the "intended recipient" going to be decided? Via telepathy perhaps? :-)
Consider: the president (sending from her hotmail account, hotsox@hotmail.com) wants to send a mail to fred@example.com. She could send a mail to presidents-rewriter@college.com, but then the rewriter would have no idea that it was for fred@example.com.
You could go back to the 1980's and use source-routed addresses like
fred%example.com@president.college.comI suspect she wouldn't like having to do that.
Or you could get the president to configure her account to send all outbound mail via your SMTP server, and use SMTP AUTH to identify herself. The mail server knows her identity so can then rewrite her From: header appropriately before relaying it.
But if you're going to all that trouble to configure her MUA, you could also configure her MUA to send the correct From: header too, which makes the whole exercise pointless.
If the requirement is for the president to be able to send mails from a cybercafe, maybe you should just set up your own webmail service she can login to. There are many webmail frontends which can talk IMAP to Dovecot.
Is if this senario is possible?
Based on the above, I think you need to make your requirements clearer :-)
Would postfix on the new system do the address re-writes or would Dovecot do it?
Header rewriting and mail delivery is nothing to do with Dovecot. (Well, there is Dovecot LDA with Sieve filtering, which can do a very limited series of actions just before the mail gets added to the mailbox, but I don't think that's what you want)
What would store the information necessary for the reply routing?
That could be in a flat file, or a .db file, or custom attributes in an LDAP database, or SQL, or ...
Regards,
Brian.