Application Development Software

Hello All,

A little background information first. I'm an IT specialist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and provide technical support and mail system development to our fleet of ocean survey vessels.

We have a somewhat unique requirement to support our ocean going research vessel mesaaging systems. Since the vessels are at sea, and moving, they
do not have a connecion to the internet or NOAA WAN. We've developed a custom MTA solution that receives email from the Sun messaging server as SMTP traffic and then stores the e-mail as a compressed text file. These compressed files are then transferred between ship and shore via sattelite link or cell phones. The files are decompressed, read and then sent via SMTP to the relaying messaging server on shore. Message delivery to the ship works the same way, only in the reverse direction. This system has been in use for 6 years using Netscape Messaging Server 4.

Although our MTA system overcomes the lack of a TCPIP conncetion for message delivery, the problem that still exists is the synchroniztion of the LDAP.
Since we can not keep the LDAP synchronized we create one LDAP to contain all shipboard accounts , that the messagging server uses for lookup, and another instance that contains all other @noaa.gov addresses which is provided only as an IMAP client lookup directory. This apporach worked fine with Netscape as it only used the User ID lookup, did not care about the domain, to verify that a user was local.

Here is the problem we now face:

1) NOAA requires that all users, shipboard and shore based, have an email address in the @noaa.gov domain.
2) The direcories can not be synchronized between ship and shore to stay current.

We can configure the Sun MTA, using imta.cnf to deliver "noaa.gov" domain locally but any addresses that are not in the ship LDAP ( shore based addresses) are rejected with a 5.1.1 error code at the client SMTP session.

We can configure the system to send all @noaa.gov mail to our Ship MTA, bu then no mail is delivered locally.

The question: Is there any way to accomplish both on Sun Messaging Server 6.3 as we did on Netscape 4?

Ideally we would prefer to have a rewrite rule, or other mechanism, that routes all local mail to the Sun system and any @noaa.gov addresses not in the LDAP to the Ship MTA system via SMTP. These rules both have to work at the same time and of course the mail domain name is the same for local mail and relayed mail.