Collecting email in a mixed environment
David Clover 18 April 2012 12:19:55
| Some changes in the way our University Enterprise email operates has meant that we recently needed to find a new way to collect 'agent' emails that are designed to trigger workflow processes on our IBM Domino environment. We don't use Domino as a corporate mail hub or for personal email at all here, that's all handled by Exchange 2010. But we do use our 8.5.3 Domino server in the Faculty to support a variety of workflow processes driven by web or desktop Notes clients and they require an inbound flow of emails to work. Up to now, emails have arrived at a software switch at our internet border which maps the inbound address of an email to one of several mail servers on campus - including Exchange, Domino, First Class and UNIX. In future, Exchange 2010 will handle all incoming email and this means that in our University environment, every mail entity now requires its own centrally-mounted Exchange mailbox. | |
We could have set up 'push' rules on all the Exchange boxes (there are quite a lot) to pass the messages across, but this would have meant a lot of work in creating separate mail profiles and rules for every item (and we have about 30 or more to convert). If the Domino server should be offline for maintenance at any point, that would have meant a lot of Non-Delivery-Notices and failed emails being pushed out from Exchange which is something we didn't want. The fail-safe answer was clearly to 'pull' these emails off the Exchange mailboxes from within the Domino server itself. To the rescue came Andy Brunner's excellent (and free) POP3 Collect Utility which we've installed and configured on our Domino server. Because it is possible to collect email from an Exchange Mailbox via POP3, Andy's utility is set up to poll a number of Exchange boxes, collect the email and delete it from the Exchange server on collection to avoid exceeding mailbox quotas. The POP3Collect utility then simply routes it on to the appropriate 'functional' mailbox on our Domino server and the workflow is carried out normally. Andy's utility requires some Java software to be installed on the server, and we needed to make some firewall tweaks to allow it to 'see' the SSL POP3 port properly on the Exchange end. The POP3Collect utility has a simple database (POP3Collect.nsf) which contains the configuration for connecting to the remote POP3 server and creating accounts. Once the mailbox is created in Exchange, adding a new account is then a few moments work. There's a simple syntax for collecting email using POP3 (or indeed IMAP) from 'functional' MS Exchange mailboxes. You have to set the username as 'domain-name/username/boxname'. The password used will be that for 'username' so we add an Active Directory 'service' account as the username to the permissions on the Exchange mailbox. Those credentials are the ones then used to authorise collection from the POP3Collect utility at the Domino end. So we are very quickly and quietly back in business thanks to Mr Brunner and his most useful free gift! | |
- Comments [0]
RSS
Feeds
Podcasts