Fetch mail from external mail provider?
Hello,
some of my clients would like to to fetch mails from their external hotmail-accounts (or other provider) into their cpanel-account.
How can I provide them such a function?
Thank you and kind regards,
Sascha
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Hello, How are the users accessing their email account on the cPanel server? Is it through a specific webmail application, or a desktop email client? Are they using IMAP or POP3? Thank you. 0 -
Depending on the provider you have a few options: [LIST] - To receive all future emails from the alternate provider use their native forwarding function. I've only come across one external provider who didn't have this functionality baked in, quick and simple solution.
- To retrieve previous emails you can install imapsync on your server (or an external Linux machine/VM) and pull the current contents of the external mailbox across. Paired with the forwarding arrangement above this is an easy way to transfer existing contents to a new email address, it will even move folders
- For ongoing forwarding with a provider which DOESN'T provide native forwarding it gets a little trickier. I have one client in this situation, the solution was to install fetchmail and configure it (via .fetchmailrc, a forwarder and a cronjob) to check the external account every 5 minutes and retrieve any new mail. Use the following config for maximum cpanel compatibility including antispam checking
set no bouncemail defaults: antispam -1 batchlimit 100 poll mail.example.com with protocol pop3 user externalmail@example.com password YourPlaintextPassword is "arbitraryforwarder@example.com" fetchall no rewrite mda "/usr/sbin/sendmail -i -f %F -- %T";
The arbitraryforwarder@example.com[/EMAIL] should be a standalone cpanel forwarder set to forward to the final destination account, this ensures the email is passed through the standard delivery path and is subject to antispam checks.0 -
Hey Guys, sorry for late reply and thank you for your contribution in this thread. I haven't tested with the forwarder yet, but I'm afraid that when forwarding their hotmail to their cPanel-mail all spam will bypass hotmail-spam-filtering and included the forwarded message. So I thought using something like fetchmail or getmail or any other mail-retrieval-agent- Fetchmail does not seem to authentificate using modern TLS protocols, so I would prefer to use other solutions. Can you recommend on a better and more secure way to retrieve mail from external mailprovider into cPanel-mail? Thank you and kind regards, Sascha 0 -
Can you recommend on a better and more secure way to retrieve mail from external mailprovider into cPanel-mail?
Hello, Can you provide some more insight into the purpose of importing the external email into cPanel? For instance, are the customers using a specific webmail application (e.g. Horde, Roundcube) and they'd prefer to use that same webmail application for their external email account? Or, is this a one-time move to migrate old emails from Hotmail? Thank you.0 -
Hello, thank you for your reply and sorry for the long delay. "Can you provide some more insight into the purpose of importing the external email into cPanel? For instance, are the customers using a specific webmail application (e.g. Horde, Roundcube) and they'd prefer to use that same webmail application for their external email account? Or, is this a one-time move to migrate old emails from Hotmail?" Many of my customers have started to email by using freemail such as hotmail.com or web.de in the "early years" after 1996. They have never dumbed these email-accounts, for whatever reason, maybe nostalgic. In later years they have become more professional email-users, having their own domain, websites, mailaddress etc. I'm hosting many domain-mail-accounts of this kind of mail-user on my legacy hosting-platform and need to migrate them into our cPanel. This legacy-platform provides a proper fetchmail-service, comparable to gMails fetchmail service, where only new messages will be fetched via POP (or you can call this "Remote-POP" or "RPOP"). I have realized, that really a lot of these customers are using this RPOP service, because they want to receive their private messages - provided by their freemail-accounts - and their professional messages (provided by their domain-mail-provider) into a single INBOX. Hence, I really need this kind of RPOP function or something similar in cPanel. You may know how gMail is doing this, in order to understand more easily. Is there any chance to advice me about how to provide this function in cPanel? Best regards, Sascha 0 -
Hello, The imapsync utility is often used for similar purposes: HOW TO: Using IMAPSync to Transfer mail from server to server Would this work in your case? Thank you. 0 -
Thank you Michael, I appreciate that. The function rather relies on POP not IMAP. We use imapsync to migrate Mail-Accounts between differnen providers. imapsync does not delete mails on source-mailserver after migration is completed. We need a cron-based fetch-mail / RPOP/RemotePop kinda function, where the user will enter his hotmail-credentials once and afterwards all new incoming mail on his source-mailaccount will be fetched into his cPanel mailaccount " I have found the documentation about our legacy-mailserver, that describes the desired function: CommuniGate Pro: RPOP Module 0 -
Hello, I'm not aware of any existing solutions for such a migration. You may want to reach out to a qualified system administrator for help finding or creating such a utility. We provide a list of companies offering system admin services at: System Administration Services | cPanel Forums Thank you. 0 -
I'm not looking for migration. It's just a service that will be used along other mail-services. I need to check with SysAdminDevelopers to build something like this for us. Thank you :-) 0 -
Michael, this is a pretty valid situation encountered when people want to consolidate other accounts into one primary account. That doesn't always work with forwarding, and something like fetchmail is a proper solution to it; not just a one-time transfer/migration. Gmail, Hotmail, and most other services have this as an option in their configuration. I would consider adding it to cPanel. 0 -
Hello @brt, I encourage you to open a feature request if you'd like to see this functionality offered directly in cPanel & WHM: Submit A Feature Request Thank you. 0 -
Hi Sascha, Did you get anywhere with this? I'd be very interested to hear if you managed to come up with a workable solution. Regards Paul 0
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