Hello All,

I would appreciate some feedback on my idea of offering backup MX service. It is technically easy to setup and for most clients would require almost no actual bandwidth usage.

Has anyone else here offered similar service? If so what are the gotchas?

Originally posted by jmcmike
It is technically easy to setup and for most clients would require almost no actual bandwidth usage. True on both counts; I'd just wonder what market there is. How many people or organizations want it (or even know whether they should), and how much would anyone pay?

We too have thought about this. It would pretty much take a dedicated server I would think. At least as far as an administrative viewpoint goes. I would be interested in anyone doign this or any articles on the web.

a couple of years ago when alot of people running servers were on dial up or sometype of dedicated dial up this was pretty popular - but with the increasing popularity of more stable broadband options I don't really see a huge need for this anymore.

the way most mail servers / dns servers are set up - unless things are down for like... 15 hours or more you really don't need secondary mx.

-neil

Backup MX... Secondary Mx...

What exactly is this Mx thingy ?????

Originally posted by Chang Lee
Backup MX... Secondary Mx...

What exactly is this Mx thingy ?????

MX = mail exchanger

Whilst it's extremely simple to set up and administer a secondary mail exchange service, the biggest gotcha is abuse: there are lots of scenarios in which you have no control over the mail that ends up queued on your machine waiting to be delivered to a domain's primary MX.

Imagine queuing 100,000 bounced pieces of SPAM...

I have come across a number of companies that offer secondary MX services, and they generally charge by bandwidth use. The guys at everydns.net are also working on a service offering:

http://campaign.everybox.com

(that page also outlines a number of gotchas and solutions)


Jason

My objection to backup mail service has always been that it still relies on the primary coming up to accept the mail at some point.
You would still not get the mail during the priomary outage (or would you?)

We have our own domain set up with two seperate servers on two seperate networks but both e-mail accounts are polled seperately via POP3 so if the primary goes down mail does go to the secondary and comes through immediately.
Its a bit cumbersome but it works very well.

Gordon