[Discuss] Lost email?

[jack at coats.org (Jack Coats)]

Derek,
   First you did it the right way.  And other email servers should do
a store and forward.
   But in the future you might configure a 'secondary email server'.
If you have a vendor or
a friend that runs an email server, see if they will configure their
server to do 'store and forward'
for you.  To 'secondary' they need to accept email being sent to your
domain, and to
allow your server to poll them when it comes up (and preferably other
times they will just
forward it to you automatically) and dump the mail for your domain to
your email server.
If they are not in the same data center or in another area of town,
the odds of your server and
theirs being down at the same time is minimal.
  Once configured, set the mx records for your domain with your server
having a higher
priority so it will get the mail first.  Put in another MX record
pointing to their server, at a lower
priority.  This allows people sending email to your domain to try your
server first, and your
'secondary server' if yours isn't available.  This way it looks like
your server is 'always up'
because people sending you email never sees it as 'down'.
  (BTW, I may have the priority numbering backward, so as always YMMV,
and RTFineM
to get it right the first time! :) )
><> ... Jack
Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart... Colossians 3:23

"You don't manage people; you manage things. You lead people."
"It?s easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission" ? Grace
Hopper, US Navy Admiral


On Thu, Jun 16, 2011 at 8:10 AM, Derek Atkins <derek at ihtfp.com> wrote:
> I was working on upgrading a mail server last night. To stop email delivery I just turned off postfix's smtpd entry. ?I think this was a mistake, I'm not seeing any email retires from 6-12pm. ?Did I make a booboo? If so it only affected me and my wife, and I would definitely have learned from my mistake...
>
> In trying to not lose email I think I lost email...
>
> For future reference it looks like you can set postfix to just return a 4xx code on all mail with a transport map entry in main.cf. ?but somehow I thought smtp would retry on connection refused.
>
> -derek
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