Messaging Routing Puzzle - sharpen your pencils

How good is your grasp of routing structures and Domino configuration settings? Put it to a test. ACME corporation finally wants to replace their aging legacy eMail with a shiny new Domino 8.5. But like in every larger organisation they are very careful and opt for a prolonged co-existence between the legacy server and the new collaboration platform. So only one location shall migrate and depending on their success the others will follow. Here are the constraints:

Acme hates SPAM and viruses. So ALL messages from and to internet eMail need to be routed through servers/services provided by MessageLabs
Only one Internet domain acme.com shall be used.
The servers can see each other on a VPN connection
Users (at least on Domino) should see ALL users in the address book

Getting Routing right shouldn't be too difficult isn't it?

Now they wonder about:

Should both servers have public IP addresses? The MX obviously points to the MessageLabs servers
What connection documents with what settings do they need?
What Domain documents with what settings do they need?
Is a Smarthost configuration needed?
How does an entry of a legacy user in the Domino directory need to look like?
How can they eliminate the risk of circular routings?
Which server should mails get delivered to when coming from MessageLabs?
Which server (or both) should send out messages to MessageLabs?
How should messages from the Internet to Domino get routed?
How should messages from the Internet to the legacy mail get routed?
How should messages from the legacy mail to Domino get routed?
How should messages from Domino to the legacy mail get routed?
Should MessageLabs have access to the user list (so messages to unknown users can be rejected at lab level)?
What else can you recommend to watch out for? Obviously keeping coexistence short, but politics might prolong it

Can you help them?
Update: We are only interested in mail routing. No calendar, groups or migration. Plain routing only. The larger group of people are in the "S location" that also has better bandwidth.

Posted by Stephan H Wissel on 06 April 2011 | Comments (3) | categories: Show-N-Tell Thursday

posted by Peter Smith on Wednesday 06 April 2011 AD:
I know it's not in the spirit of the web, but I've mailed you how I'd approach this, hope it helps.

posted by Keith Brooks on Thursday 07 April 2011 AD:
Lots of questions, but keep it simple.
Route in/out via Message labs using connection docs and an external domain or Internet reference to the message labs.
If they have LDAP, use it, if not, AD? Just include an internal routing name to get to domino, such as user@org.local. In domino make sure names field holds this .local address but their internet address should still be org.com or whatever it is. If you need Domino to go to other emails, set up the server config to allow relays else they won't go.
To mail from Domino to other users, import full address list into a DA and get it routed that way, or add all users to Domino with their internal routing name of other email servers, for example, joe@org_old.local. Of course the dns and various systems need to understand the alternative names too.

posted by Martin on Friday 08 April 2011 AD:
I would say:
- no public IP necessary
- 1 SMTP connection routing email to MessageLabs
- 1 Domain document with acme.com domain
- no smarthost needed
- legacy user should be forwarded to user@legacy.local (and legacy server updated to accept this address but return with normal address)
- deliver email do Domino
- both servers should send emails to MessageLabs
- Internet to Domino via MessageLabs
- Internet to legacy via MessageLabs and Domino
- legacy to Domino via MessageLabs or directly (depends how legacy route emails)
- Domino to legacy directly via legacy.local domain
- MessageLabs can have access to user list
- no idea what else can be important