I did some more testing and this is what I did. I set up the servers as follows:
Primary mail server. mail.abc.com IP 1.2.3.4 Send Only Mail Server. mail.abc.com IP 3.4.5.6 I added a reverse PTR so that 3.4.5.6 resolved to mail.abc.com. I left my existing MX record for mail.abc.com untouched. The Idea being my application would send out mail via the new server at ip 3.4.5.6. But to everyone else in the world incoming and their outgoing email would use IP 1.2.3.4 However, for some reason incoming mail started to hit the send only server. Apparently some spammer did a reverse dns and found the ptr to the send only server. They got a user does not exist message when they tried to send to the server, but this configuration looked like it was going to be a problem so I scrapped the idea. Then I reconfigured to: Primary mail server. mail.abc.com IP 1.2.3.4 Send Only Mail Server. mail2.abc.com IP 3.4.5.6 MX 10 mail.abc.com MX 50 mail2.abc.com This works. However, if I have to reboot the mail.abc.com server I do not want mail2.abc.com to be acting as a backup or any incoming email to be directed to mail2.abc.com. Any ideas? =================================================== Okay, lets say I want to do the latter. I have mail.abc.com set up to handle incoming and outgoing email for my customers. I set up another imail server (box) also with the official hostname of mail.abc.com and a domain of mail.abc.com with the appropriate IP address. I want to use this 2nd server strictly for sending large volumes of outbound email and never want it to ever see incoming email. Note...I am not spamming! I have users that use a web application which sends them email they requested. I just want to move that outbound email load to a separate physical server. It should EHLO with mail.abc.com which has a valid MX record. What if anything would I need to do to the SMTP banner? ----------------------------- If your outgoing mail is MAIL FROM: @mail2.abc.com, then yes, you must have an MX record for mail2.abc.com to avoid rejection by anti-spam measures. But if you're sending the MAIL FROM: @mail.abc.com, you already have an MX record, and no questions should be asked. In either case, you should have the A, HELO, PTR, and SMTP banner as tidy as possible for your new outbound relay host. See archives for best practices if you need to. -Sandy __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Exclusive Video Premiere - Britney Spears http://launch.yahoo.com/promos/britneyspears/ To Unsubscribe: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/mailing-lists.html List Archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/imail_forum%40list.ipswitch.com/ Knowledge Base/FAQ: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/IMail/
