Hi Heiko,

On Wed, 16 Jun 2010, Heiko Schlittermann wrote:

>>> Does exim use the Backup MX if the primary MX is available? Can I 
>>> configure exim to prefer the primary MX?
>>
>> Exim should try the primary first, as any MTA should. Sometimes it may 
>> fail to reach the primary, and fall back to the secondary, particularly 
>> if the primary uses greylisting. The secondary is tempfailing the mail, 
>> because *it* thinks the primary is still up, which causes exim to try 
>> the primary again later. Seems fairly normal and OK to me.
>
> But it's quite stupid by second mx, to think that my (network) 
> connectivity to the second mx is the same as to the first mx.

Maybe, or maybe it just hasn't noticed yet. I implemented a trick with 
exim to do exactly this, to ensure that the backup MX does not accept mail 
when the primary is still up, to reduce the backup MX spam problem:

   http://blog.aptivate.org/2009/01/28/backup-mail-exchangers/

I reduced the callout positive cache expiry time to five minutes, but 
still during that time, the backup MX will think that the primary is still 
up. I think that it doesn't do any harm except to slightly delay mail 
being accepted by the backup when the primary is down.

Cheers, Chris.
-- 
_ ___ __     _
  / __/ / ,__(_)_  | Chris Wilson <0000 at qwirx.com> - Cambs UK |
/ (_/ ,\/ _/ /_ \ | Security/C/C++/Java/Perl/SQL/HTML Developer |
\ _/_/_/_//_/___/ | We are GNU-free your mind-and your software |

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