> What do other people with perm connection who run their own mail > server do for secondary/backup? (ie. secondary mx)
My suggestion is that you *DON'T*! Why not you ask? Think about how the mail system works. Someone sends a mail to you, it goes from their desktop/mail client of choice onto the mail queue of their outbound smtp server. The server then does an MX lookup of the domain and get's your mail servers IP. If it can't establish a connection to your machine it will then queue the mail and retry every hour for up to four days. (this is dependant on the mail system config obviously but that's the recommended standard). If your mail system is still not up then the sender gets a bounce saying you didn't get their mail. If however you have a secondary MX then the smtp server, when it can't contact your box will send it there. And that server does what with the mail?......Precisely the behaviour of the originating server we just described. I.E the secondary adds what value? NONE in fact it is worse than that, consider if the secondary server goes down while your mail is queued up on it, no mail system at $11/month is gonna have transaction logging on it so when they recover it, it will be from last nights backup so all the mail received and queued today for your server will be lost. That's *ALL* the mail queued up to your domain from anywhere in the world not just from our example sender. This means that the recipent has no idea that they are missing mail and the sender gets no bounce back to say that the mail wasn't delivered. However if you don't have a secondary then mail for your domain will be queued up on a whole bunch of outbound smtp servers around the world. If our senders local outbound smtp was to suffer a crash and be rebuilt, only mail from that part of the world would be missing as mail from other domains will be queued up on their still functioning servers, and most erstwhile system operators would tell their users that the outbound server crashed and any mail they sent in the last couple of days should be re-sent. But your secondary MX would have no idea who's mail could be queued up on it cause it could have come from anywhere in the world so they won't be able to tell them even if they had the desire to do so. If the secondary queues the mail for longer (so that you can get your machine back together before messages start bouncing) then that is not necessarily better, How long should someone wait before the system tells them that you didn't get the message. Mail that goes stale is worse than mail that get's bounced. Fair better for the sender to be told you didn't get the mail so that they can ring you and invite you to the pub, instead of just assuming that you got the message but are under the thumb so won't come for a beer. Ok enough of a rant but you get the picture, $11 / month is not value at all their charging you money for a service you would be better off without. HTH Pete -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
