Content filtering and Redirections in Users

[talha]

Hi,

I wanted to know the sequence of actions performed by AMS. I have redirections setup in the User section so all mails to abc@domain.com are also delivered to 123@domain.com.

The problem is that when 123@domain.com sends mail to abc@domain.com; 123 gets the sent mail in his inbox too because of redirection. Can i control this via content filtering? Or is there anyway to control this duplication?

[talha]

One more thing - how can I avoid duplications in this scenario:

user: abc@domain.com gets mail automatically from an email: group@domain.com. So when someone sends email to both abc@domain.com and group@domain.com. user abc gets the same email twice.

Is there a way to avoid this duplication?

Also if I make group@domain.com as an alias of abc - then an email sent to both group@domain.com and abc@domain.com still be delivered twice?

[rob]

Redirections are implicit redirections which will always direct all incoming mail to another address, and so there is not way to configure these to be selective. However, you can setup redirections with content filtering which have a bit more intelligence (ie redirect mail to that account, where the sender does not match a certain address). As to receiving duplicate copies, the mail server has built in technology to ignore duplicate emails, both only if they are received as single mail, ie a user composes a mail with two receipients in the To line. However, depending on the external source, sometimes mails like this are split into 2 distinct emails and delivered seperately two times. In this situation the mail server will see it has 2 unique emails and so cannot filter them out. This is common if a POP3 Retrieval is used in the mail delivery process.

[talha]

ok following your advice here is my testing scenario: my own email id is talha@mydomain.com and i created a id test@mydomain.com now i have set a content filtering rule: condition: any smtp recepient contains "test@mydomain.com". actions: 1. remove recepient if it contains "talha@mydomain.com" 2. add recepient: "talha@mydomain.com".
So this way if talha@mydomain.com is already there it is removed and then talha@mydomain.com is added for redirection. This should eliminate duplicates if some sends a single email to both test@mydomain.com and talha@mydomain.com i wont get it twice.

But this is not working - please check and see what is wrong: contentfiltering rule is copied here:
{ -
enabled=1
name=testing incoming redirections
{ conditions
{ -
conditiontype=3
stringtype=1
stringstring=test@mydomain.com
stringcasesensitive=0
usestringlist=0
sizelarger=1
sizesize=0
accountquerywho=0
accountqueryaccountexists=0
applicationresultapplication=
applicationresultarguments=
applicationresultreturnvalue=
applicationresulthidewindow=1
headerfield=
logicop=0
not=0
openBracketCount=0
closeBracketCount=0
}
}
{ actions
{ -
type=4
text1=
text2=
text3=
bool=0
stringtype=1
stringstring=talha@mydomain.com
stringcasesensitive=0
usestringlist=0
{ addresses
}
}
{ -
type=2
text1=
text2=
text3=
bool=0
stringtype=1
stringstring=
stringcasesensitive=0
usestringlist=0
{ addresses
{ -
address=omeir@mydomain.com
personalname=
}
{ -
address=talha@mydomain.com
personalname=
}
}
}
}
}

[talha]

Hi any suggestions/comments for me?

Duplicates are making the life of my team difficult.

[Code Crafters]

Just to recap over the whole conversation and clear up a few things:

1) User redirections generate a new email so duplicates can be possible if the redirected user was in the original delivery list.
2) You can make user redirections not deliver to the original user that's redirecting by unticking the option "Still Deliver to User".
3) Content filtering will certainly work better for this scenario to avoid duplications as follows.

Conditions:
All Emails (triggers always)

Actions:
Rename SMTP recipients that CONTAIN "test@mydomain.com" (not case sensitive) to "talha@mydomain.com".

This action will rename test to talha by removing the test recipient but only adding talha if it doesn't already exist and because this is a single mail it will only be delivered once to each user rather than redirections which generate a new email causing possible duplicates. Hopefully this will resolve your issue. Let me know if it works ok.

[talha]

HI Chris,

Thanks for the explanations and yes in testing it does work out for a single recipient but I am using the redirections for the whole department so I need 1 email address for the whole department irrespective of the number of team members. This is the scenario:

departmentA@mydomain.com - must deliver to user1, user2, and talha@mydomain.com
departmentB@mydomain.com - must delivery to user3, user4 and talha@mydomain.com
departmentC@mydomain.com - must deliver to user5, user6 and talha@mydomain.com

The problem Iam getting is this:
1. I receive two emails for An email sent to both me and any department
2. I receive three emails if an email is sent to me and any two departments
3. I get the same email back to me, when I send an email to any department (this I have controlled via rules in my outlook, above two cannot be control via outlook)

Is there anyway to avoid these duplicates and mails sent to departments must be received by all users I have listed in the department.

Please also note that I have set up filtering for outgoing mails from the users like this: smtp sender containers user1@mydomain.com rename sender to departmentA@mydomain.com and add receipients user2 and talha@mydomain.com. Similar rule for sender user2, and similar rules for other departments.

[Code Crafters]

For sending to groups you should really use either a shared address book if the group is internal only and people are using WebMail, or more likely use a mailing list to allow people to send to multiple recipients in a group rather than using redirections at all. This will also ensure that each person only receives the email once as mailing lists are resolved into real users before delivery with no duplicates. Make sure you set the mailing list subject trigger phrase to a blank string though if you want anyone to be able to send to the mailing list.

[talha]

Ok - so how do the mailing list work for external senders and external recipients of the mailing list?

I created a mailing list test@mydomain.com (i had to delete the user test@mydomain.com for this).
POP3 retreival is set to download from my external server so AMS is downloading from test@mydomain.com and delivering to test@mydomain.com.
In the mailing list I added one external and one internal address (talha@mydomain.com).
Internal address (talha@mydomain.com) is receiving the mail fine from external senders. But if in the original both test@mydomain.com and talha@mydomain.com are marked I am still getting the mail twice.

Also the mailing list is failing to relay to the external email address this is the outmail error: (notice the from line is empty)

queueentrytime=20120530111929
lastsendattempttime=20120530113229
sendattemptcount=14
warningsent=0
from=
originalfromip=66.96.131.55
{ notsentto
{ -
address=omeir@external.mydomain.com
reason=Rejected with: 550 SMTP Envelope Sender must be valid
}
}
{ sentto
}

what do you suggest?

[Code Crafters]

POP3 retrievals can cause multiple delivery of the same emails depending how the delivery is set up. There's not too much you can do about that but we're going to try to add something in the future to try and check for duplicate emails and filter them.

As for mailing lists to external email addresses, there is no SMTP sender on purpose so that any failures don't come back to the mailing list since there is no user for the mailing list to receive the responses. We are planning to add a bounce email sender to mailing lists in a future version so that any failures could be used to remove invalid recipients from the mailing list. You can use content filtering to add an SMTP sender for mails to the mailing list so that external mail servers won't refuse the mail based on having a null (empty) SMTP sender.