Zimbra: Getting Away Messages to Work With Domain Alises

While most of our mail is simply sent to “person@tcg.com”, our Zimbra server has a larger qualified domain name (let’s call it “mail.tcg.com”).  To get this to work, we completely configured up the domain “mail.tcg.com” and all the users within our Zimbra administration panel, and then used “zmprov” to create a Domain Alias that maps “tcg.com” to “mail.tcg.com”:

zmprov cd tcg.com zimbraDomainType alias zimbraMailCatchAllAddress @tcg.com zimbraMailCatchAllForwardingAddress @mail.tcg.com

With this alias, mail sent to “person@tcg.com” is automatically sent to “person@mail.tcg.com”. However, for some reason the “out of office” reply mail didn’t work. As it turns out, there is a Zimbra bug (or security feature)in which the away message is restricted to the main domain and does not reply to email sent to aliased domains.  One solution being developed is to add an option to always send out of office messages regardless of email address.  Until then what can you do?

Since I only have one alias that is being used, I can set the zimbraPrefOutOfOfficeDirectAddress property for the account.  To let “person@tcg.com” send away messages I set:

zmprov ma person@zimbra.tcg.com zimbraPrefOutOfOfficeDirectAddress person@tcg.com

Unfortunately this needs to be set for every user with an away message, but it is a functional work-around until the fix is released.

3 responses to “Zimbra: Getting Away Messages to Work With Domain Alises”

  2. Thank you VERY much, hit exactly the same problem — fix worked perfectly, although this is not a very maintainable (long term) solution.

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