Re: [exim] exim relay backup question in case of disaster?

On Mon, Nov 08, 2004 at 09:26:06AM -0900, Andy Firman said:
>
> I have an interesting request from a company that we are relaying
> mail for. We are simply doing virus/spam scanning and then
> passing the mail onto their mail server in another location.
> If there is a disaster, they want access to the mail that is
> queued up on our Exim relay server.
>
> Hmmm....
> They get about 3,000 emails per day, so if there are 5,000 + emails
> in queue on our server after a disaster at that company, I would
> think that we could make the changes to Exim to be the final destination
> and then offer a webmail interface. They have about 120 users, but
> management would be the only ones to need the emergency mail access.
>
> I am thinking this is more complicated than it seems.

Accessing the items in the queue may indeed get messy.

One option I was looking at in a similar situation was to tee off a copy
of the mail... Before your router that delivers non-local mail, you
would do something like:

backuplocalcopy:
driver = accept
domains = customer.com
local_parts = /etc/customermanagers
transport = local_delivery
unseen


This delivers a copy to a local mailbox for users listed in the file
"customermanagers" for the "customer.com" domain.

An offline script could expire any mail older than 2 days or so to keep
the mailboxes from exploding...

You could actually use a lot of the logic in vexim to manage the
accounts. In fact, you could probably use vexim for the entire thing
just by tweaking the vexim router stanza (adding "unseen".)

Hope this helps...