We use low priority MX records on newly deployed hosts to be able to monitor 
the behaviour of these hosts without getting the full load.

If all looks sane, we bump the priority after a few hours/days.



Stefan



-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: John Levine via mailop <mailop@mailop.org>
Gesendet: Donnerstag 17 Dezember 2020 22:29
An: mailop@mailop.org
Betreff: [mailop] What's the point of secondary MX servers?



As we all know, MX records have a priority number, and mail senders
are supposed to try the highest priority/lowest number servers first,
then fall back to the lower priority.

I understand why secondary MX made sense in the 1980s, when the net
was flakier, there was a lot of dialup, and there were hosts that only
connected for a few hours or even a few minutes a day.

But now, in 2020, is there a point to secondary servers? Mail servers
are online all the time, and if they fail for a few minutes or hours,
the client servers will queue and retry when they come back.

Secondary servers are a famous source of spam leaks, since they
generally don't know the set of valid mailboxes and often don't keep
their filtering in sync?  What purpose do they serve now?

R's,
John

PS: I understand the point of multiple MX with the same priority for
load balancing.  The question is what's the point of a high priorty
server that's always up, and a lower priority server that's, I dunno,
probably always up, too.



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