On Wed, Nov 12, 2003 at 04:23:45PM +0000, Tony Finch wrote:
> What do they think a secondary MX will give them that is better than
> letting the email wait on the sending MTAs?
If the mail is queued on a secondary MX under your administrative control
it's much easier to control the sending on of the mail to the primary hosts
when they come back online.
If you leave it up to other hosts, it may take a while for messages to start
coming through again, based on their individual retry rules, or indeed you may
find hundreds of sites trying to all connect at the same time. Depending on
your platform specification that may or may not be a bad thing.
One other crucial point about having your own secondary MXes is that you will
probably elect to hold mail for your site for longer than a remote site may,
which would be a factor if your primary mailservers were down for a long time.
All in all, I think you do benefit quite a lot from running your own secondary
MXes rather than relying on remote sites to hold onto the mail.
Personally, I also think it's 'The Right Thing' to take responsibility for a
message as soon as you can, if at all possible, to save the sending site's
resources.
Cheers,
Ollie
--
Oliver Cook Systems Administrator, Claranet UK
ollie@??? 020 7903 3065
