The Answer Gang

Replacing an MS Exchange Mail Server with Linux

From Jonathan Hutchins on Mon, 04 Sep 2000

Answered by: Les Catterall, Anthony E . Greene

Hi Jonathan,

You say:

So far, I have yet to figure out a way to implement this kind of feature on Linux workstations. The internal address scheme could probably be handled using Netscape as a mail client and an LDAP server, but I don't know how we would handle the external address book.

The functionality you refer to is of course implemented on mail servers, not upon the workstations (client PCs). For example the SMTP server program Sendmail, has "aliases" which provides the functionality you seek. See the on-line manual entry: "man 5 aliases".

Cheers - Les Catterall

Anthony E . Greene suggested:

So far, I have yet to figure out a way to implement this kind of feature on Linux workstations. The internal address scheme could probably be handled using Netscape as a mail client and an LDAP server, but I don't know how we would handle the external address book.

I used LDAP both at home at at my office to create a shared address book. I update the address book using a browser and the "ldap-abook" package. Ldap-abook is a perl CGI script and module that make it easy to update an LDAP address book.

I use Red Hat Linux 6.2, which comes with OpenLDAP almost ready to run.

The hardest part was exporting the data from whatever format it was in to an LDIF file for import by the LDAP server. After that, I customized the CGI script that came with ldap-abook to improve the appearance of it's HTML output. It works just fine.

Tony

Jonathan and Les wrote each other again:

I don't think I'd want to maintain a 300 entry "Aliases" database (And that's just my personall address book!),...

But someone's got to maintain the details somewhere?

........ nor does this provide the address look-up capabilities that Outlook and Exchange do together. I can even use my Address Book from the Exchange Server to insert addresses in postal letters in Word, but what I'm really after is the ability that Outlook and Lotus Notes have to automatically look up (and optionally complete) names and/or addresses during message composition (or immediately on send, keeping the message open in then event of a lookup failure).

It seems I misunderstood what you are trying to do. You are looking for something which is tightly integrated with MS applications. Indeed, sendmail e-mail aliases won't help you there.

Anthony Greene has suggested ways to connect Outlook and Netscape/Linux clients to an LDAP database as a partial solution. I'll have to look more carefully at how such an interface manages addresses (things such as adding and updating), but Anthony's pointers may supply at least part of the solution.

Thanks for the ideas,

Jonathan

You're welcome. Good luck with LDAP.

Cheers - Les Catterall

Copyright © 2000, James T. Dennis
Published in the Linux Gazette Issue 58 October 2000

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