Re: How do you setup email so that a copy of every message goes to gmail ?
- From: The Natural Philosopher <a@xxx>
- Date: Sat, 20 Oct 2007 12:06:39 +0100
Keith Keller wrote:
On 2007-10-19, The Natural Philosopher <a@xxx> wrote:Actually no.If those pulling it off via POP hadn't go a complete message, they didn't delete it, so they got it next time.
POP isn't SMTP, which is what the OP was curious about. If your SMTP
server goes down without a backup MX, all incoming messages will be
delayed or bounced back to the sender.
Biggest worry was if we lost the disk,so we RAIDED that. Backups useless. Data always on the move.
If your organization has important incoming mail, backup MX is probably
at least as important as a RAID array.
We had that argument long and intense with the customers - we were an ISP of a sort - we handled mail for our customers as it were.
That mail sever WAS their backup MX if they had their own servers and wanted to use it that way: If not it was their popmail server and had no MX backups.
The reasons we had no backups server was this.
Firstly, its unnecessary. Backup MX dates back to the time when the net was multipathed and unreliable. If your mail didn't get through one way, it go through another. Making it temporarily divert to a third party open relay invited use of that relay for SPAM, added another machine that might get hacked and mail read from, and did nothing to get the mail to where it was finally meant for, since that machine was down. in addiion the Internet changed, and became to an extent multipathed and relablke. IP routing itself took care of broken transit ISP'S. If the target or source ISP was down, all bets were off anyway - MX alternatives did not help the mail reach its destination any quicker.
In addition, and this proved a key point for many of our customers, it gave the false impression that the mail had reached its destination. Our customers were commercial: Overwhelmingly they said that if the mail was down, their correpondents would FAR rather get a bounce or a delay message than no message at all with their mail somewhere else 'in suspension'. If it was urgent, they then KNEW it hadn't yet reached its destination.
This was brought home to me by a angry customer when the mail server did in fact crash once. After working through the soothing noises, it transpired that the support people had been giving him 'it will be fixed in an hour' messages for the last three (hours). He demanded to know when. I couldn't honestly say, but my estimate at that point was a further two.
"THANK YOU" he said "NOW I know that in order to get the contract to my lawyers, I will have to use a fax: That is all I needed to know. I don't care whether your mail is down for a week, I just need to KNOW that it will be, so I can make other arrangements"
That stuck in my mind very much. A large proportion of our support calls involved "Ive sent urgent mail: Ive had no reply" anyway, to the extent we built tools to search the logfiles, that the support people could easily use.
Adding secondary MX's made it pretty much a nightmare of searching two log files, Ok: you might say 'why not put the logs on a central different server?'..yeah..what if THAT goes down..
No. KISS rules. We ended up with one server and a RAID with a few spare disks ready to go into the hot pluggable frame, a spare RAID PSU and a complete machine in the rack, as a spare, that we simply swapped SCSI cables into and switched on, if the first developed a non RAID hardware fault.
That proved to be the best solution and we kept it until I sold the company.
--keith.
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