How would I setup iMail to forward a user's mail to another service w/o leaving a copy locally?
- by Scott Mayfield
I have an iMail 2006 server installation in which I have a particular user that has several aliases that all point to a single user (me, for the record). I've been copying all of my mail to GMail and reading it there, but it annoys me that I have to go back weekly and log into my mail account on iMail and delete between 6 and 10 thousand copies of messages I've already received, in order to keep my mailbox from filling up (yes, I have it set with no quota, but I consider it bad form to just let the box grow indefinitely).
I've got the copying setup via an inbound user rule, but I'm wondering how to accomplish a "copy and delete" rule. The manual isn't clear on what happens with multiple matching rules (will they be processed in order, or is it a first match situation?) and there isn't a means to combine multiple actions into a single rule. If I use the "forward" action, I THINK that it's going to screw up all the sender information once the mail reaches my GMail account and show it as coming from me instead of the original senders (can anyone confirm that this is accurate?)
An easy answer would be to delete my user account entirely, replace it with an alias that maps to my GMail account, but then I would lose my ability to log into the system for admin duties. So that leads me to creating a second, lesser known account for admin use, but since it's a real account, sooner or later I'm going to get mail sent to it and I'll be back to the same situation of having a user account that doesn't get emptied periodically. I imagine I can set the quota to 0 MB to cause all incoming mail to my admin account to bounce, or setup an inbound rule to bounce everything, but this is starting to sound kludgy to me.
Does anyone know of a more direct work around to copying a user's incoming mail to an outside server and then deleting the local copy w/o removing their account entirely? Or is this just wishful thinking?
