Mike,
To do a backup MX right, it is best to use a server that is physically located elsewhere and uses a different bandwidth provider. I found another administrator to help me with these services using a combination of MS SMTP and VamSoft's ORF. You can configure MS SMTP to gate all E-mail through a 'Smart Host', but it won't do any address verification on the gateway and it will appear like it is an open relay. ORF works with MS SMTP to allow SMTP envelope rejection of invalid addresses. Currently I only verify the recipient domain and not the full address, however we are working towards a system that registers every valid address and rejects all others; it's just a matter of figuring out how to best automate the process as the functionality is already there in ORF.
Regarding the backup of E-mail, you can certainly off-load this to MS SMTP, and in this case redundancy isn't really that important. If you have the ability to turn off spam and virus protection for these mail blasts, I would definitely do that. You would need to set up MS SMTP to relay for authenticated users, add an account on that Windows server, and set your mail client to use that IP as the SMTP server. Make sure you give that IP a valid reverse DNS entry and A record in order to help ensure delivery. You can set this up on the same box in fact, just run MS SMTP on a different port and connect to it on that special port when sending (you could even use the same IP as IMail). MS SMTP is quite slim and it should be able to handle the extra traffic quite well.
You might not have to go that direction though because IMail has a setting on the Advanced tab of the SMTP settings which allows for a 'delay between recipients'. If you for instance set this to 500 (which is in milliseconds), that should allow your server enough time to handle the messages without backing up, but it will keep your sending connection open for 500 ms times the number of recipients. Certainly that would be easier to do than setting up and supporting a MS SMTP installation.
Contact me off-list if you are interested in setting up a backup MX service on a different network and I'll see what I can set up for you. I'm not sure if I can help with the mail delivery though, but you don't really need network redundancy for that.
Matt
Michael Hoyt wrote:
I would like to set up an SMTP mail "store and forward" server using Microsoft's SMTP server that can accept email for my domains in the event that my primary iMail server is temporarily down. I would also like to be able to send outbound email through this secondary server because we occasionally do an emailing to our customers and when this emailing occurs my iMail outbound queue fills and my iMail users can experience a performance hit using IMAP.
I have MX records for the three domains (commarts.com, designinteract.com, and creativehotlist.com) that point to mail.commarts.com as the primary mail server and direct.commarts.com as secondary mail server (higher preference number) and have RDNS records for these two mail servers.
The setup seems simple enough: Run MS SMTP on the IP address for my secondary email MX record and this should take care of the "store and forward" part (if my primary email server is unreachable the secondary will take the mail and should attempt delivery to the primary mail server for the number and timing of attempts configured in SMTP properties).
I want to be able to send outbound mail through this secondary email server without running an open relay. So in short: 1) I want to be able to receive email addressed to my domains through my secondary server that is then passed on to my iMail primary server. 2) I want to specify an internal IP address that is allowed to send through the secondary mail server's SMTP service. 3) I want to make sure that no email not originating from the IP address specified in 2 above is relayed to any domains that are not one of my three domains.
iMail server always accepts email with an internal destination-is this also true of MS SMTP? If no, how does one set up MS SMTP to accept mail to internal domains and deny relaying of mail from external to external domains.
Thank you in advance,
Michael Hoyt Communication Arts 110 Constitution Drive Menlo Park, CA 94025 (650) 326-6040 fax:(650) 326-1648
e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web Site: http://www.commarts.com
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