Thursday, November 17, 2011

Zimbra 7 and domain wide disclaimer...

In Zimbra 7 it is not necessary any more to hack scripts in order to get domain wide disclaimer. At least not if you want to add the same disclaimer to every mail that passes through your mail server. In case you want more control, like not attaching it to some mails, then you'll have to resort again to scripts and hacking.

So, to add disclaimer, the following would do:
zmprov mcf zimbraDomainMandatoryMailSignatureText <text disclaimer>
zmprov mcf zimbraDomainMandatoryMailSignatureHTML <html disclaimer>
zmprov mcf zimbraDomainMandatoryMailSignatureEnabled TRUE
and finally, reload amavis configuration using
zmamavisdctl reload
Note that whenever you change any of the previous three attributes you have to restart amavis. Those attributes are accessed only when amavis is started and they are used as an input to configuration writing routines.

You can query current values using gcf instead of mcf (don't forget to leave out last arguments because you are not setting values!).

Well, now, there were some problems.

The first one is that you disclaimer has probably more that one line, anyway more that you are prepared to type. In that case you can put it into a file and then use backtick shell notation with cat command to place the content of a file into appropriate place. Don't forget to place double quotes around everything so that spaces are not interpreted by the shell (like this "`cat somefile`")! There are other methods too, but this hack worked for me. Well, almost, becuse when text version of a disclaimer was attached to the text only mail, everything after the first line was cut off. HTML on the other hand worked, but, it also suffered from the second problem. And the second problem is...

The second problem is that I have Croatian in disclaimer which means it's encoded using UTF-8, and that, for some reason, doesn't play well with the LDAP, or some command inbetween, that transfers text/html disclaimer into LDAP. But I noticed that other tools, e.g. vi/vim, even bash, behaved strangely upon encountering some Croatian character. Trying to set environment variable LANG to en_US.utf8 before executing zmprov command didn't work either! And the command locale showed that C was still used. I managed to fix this by commenting out the following two lines in ~zimbra/.bash_profile file:
#export LANG=C
#export LC_ALL=C
After that (don't forget to login/logout) bash and vi started to work as expected but Zimbra still was messing up the disclaimer. That is, until I restarted amavis again. Then, it worked. In case it still doesn't work, set HTML attribute using zmprov command and restart amavis again!

This locale setting is nothing new in Zimbra. I checked previous version of Zimbra and it was also there. But until now I never had to put UTF8 into LDAP and so I never had hit this particular error.

This has left me with the last problem, text attachment isn't working as it should. So, I opened amavis configuration file /opt/zimbra/conf/amavisd.conf to see what's exactly going on. In there, I found that the file with the disclaimer should be in /opt/zimbra/data/altermime directory and it should be named _OPTION_.txt. Well, it is there but not called _OPTION_.txt. It could be that some postprocessing is performed on the values in amavis configuration file, but I ignored that as it is not important. What is important is that the file with disclaimer is called global-default.txt and it had wrong content, i.e. only the first line of the disclaimer. For a quick test I replaced it with the disclaimer I wanted to have, and voila, it worked!!!

So, why is there an error? I'll investigate later since now I have to do other things. :)

3 comments:

Irfad Razick said...

Thanks, the cat option really helped me. :)

Wellington Torrejais da Silva said...

Thanks!!

Daniel said...

hi
so, the txt and html files must be renamed for"OPTION" or I must modify the amavisd.conf file and replace the "_OPTION_" line for "global-default"??
thanks

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scientist, consultant, security specialist, networking guy, system administrator, philosopher ;)

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