Zimbra Server Roles Overview

Zimbra Server Roles Overview

   KB 22152        Last updated on 2018-01-18  




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Below the roles, with a small description, that you can find in Zimbra with their acronym.

Message Transfer Agent (MTA)

The Zimbra MTA (Mail Transfer Agent) receives mail via SMTP and routes each message, using Local Mail Transfer Protocol (LMTP), to the appropriate Zimbra mailstore server. The Zimbra MTA server includes the following programs:

  • Postfix for mail routing
  • ClamAV Antivirus engine
  • Amavis Content filter
  • SpamAssassin and DSPAM, Spam filters.

Proxy Server (Proxy)

The Zimbra Proxy is a high performance POP/IMAP/HTTP Nginx proxy server that allows end users to access their Zimbra Collaboration Server (ZCS) account using end clients such as Web Browsers, SmartPhone, Outlook, Thunderbird, or other POP/IMAP end client software. End users can connect using HTTP/S, ActiveSync, EWS, POP3/S and IMAP/S.

Mailstore (MBS)

The Mailstore is where all email messages and file attachments reside. Messages are stored in MIME format as regular files on the message file system (MFS). A message that is sent to multiple recipients who have accounts on one mailbox server is stored only once in the file system (thereby reducing storage overhead). The data store is a MariaDB database where internal mailbox IDs are linked with user accounts. The data store maps the mailbox IDs to users’ OpenLDAP accounts. This database contains each user’s set of tag definitions, folders, calendar schedules and contacts, as well as the status of each mail message - read, unread, tags associated to message, and folder the message resides in. Index and search technology is provided through Lucene and index files are maintained for each individual mailbox.

LDAP Master (LDAP M)

ZCS has its own OpenLDAP integrated solution as part of our architecture at point of install. The Zimbra LDAP directory service is used to look up email delivery addresses both from internal and external LDAP servers as well. ZCS supports the proxying of user login and access to the Global Address List (GAL) to an existing enterprise directory such as Microsoft Active Directory or other LDAP-compliant directories. Zimbra support LDAP Multi-Master role to provide the same level of service if an incident occurs on the first LDAP Master.

LDAP Replicas (LDAP R)

To provide scalability and redundancy the Master LDAP server can be horizontally scaled by deploying multiple LDAP Replica servers.

Verified Against: Zimbra Collaboration Suite 8.5, 8.6, 8.7 Date Created: 07/15/2015
Article ID: https://wiki.zimbra.com/index.php?title=Zimbra_Server_Roles_Overview Date Modified: 2018-01-18



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Wiki/KB reviewed by SME1 SME2 Copyeditor Last edit by Jorge de la Cruz
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