On Thu, Aug 17, 2017 at 09:04:45AM -0400, Tanstaafl wrote: > On 8/17/2017, 8:56:53 AM, Phil Stracchino <ph...@caerllewys.net> wrote: > > I have a single secondary MX at a domain controlled by another competent > > individual whom I know. It's useful in the event of a sustained service > > outage or other delivery problems (say, if the main application server > > went down and I had to rebuild it from backups). > > Most sites will retry by default for 1-3 days (I think 3 days is > postfix's default). > > A sending server will usually give a warning about a delay in the email > delivery within a certain amount of time, then report failure after its > configured time. > > If you have a backup MX, then the sender *will not know* that there is a > problem. > > In the vast majority of cases, the perceived benefit is simply not worth > the trouble. If your server is down for more than 3 days, then you have > bigger problems, and the vast majority of the emails you would have held > will have lost their value (if they had any real value in the first > place), and the rest would have contacted the recipient by other means > when they saw the delivery warnings/failures. > > I used to set our local warning for 4 hours (before the boss decided to > migrate to Office365), because a lot of our business is time-sensitive. > > So, again, the actual benefit is generally far less than the perceived > benefit - and there is even a real cost in many cases (sender doesn't > know there is a problem), so running a backup MX, in the vast majority > of cases, is simply not a good idea. > Another 'do nothing', that's fine, thank you. I had realised that the secondary/backup MX would mean that mail would get delivered but possibly not to where I'd see it. That's sort of why I asked the question, I was wondering about setting up way (via a 3G phone or whatever) to get to see those E-Mails.
As it is I deliver all my mail (in parallel to the SMTP delivery to my home system) to another (not at home) system into an unfiltered/unsorted mailbox so anything urgent I can extract from there if necessary. -- Chris Green
