[exim] Is a secondary MX worth the effort?

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Author: Ken Price
Date:  
To: exim users
New-Topics: Re: [exim] Is a secondary MX worth the effort? CONCLUSION
Subject: [exim] Is a secondary MX worth the effort?
In a world where most MTA's will retry a message up to 5-7 days, is a
secondary MX worth the added maintenance and configuration headache?

I have a primary datacenter in Atlanta where I have a small load
balanced cluster of MTA's. I also have a disaster recovery site
located in Dallas which can be used should Georgia fall into the
Atlantic. Theoretically, a cheap secondary MX located in - say
Seattle - would ensure that any email sent during major outages which
are less than catastrophic (5 minutes - 5 days) would be spooled and
delivered once the primary comes back up. I say "less than
catastrophic" meaning that my data center and core infrastructure
still exist, but maybe all my hard drives in all my mail servers
decide to spontaneously fail.

I understand that all anti-spam measures (spamassassin, greylisting,
etc) would have to be duplicated on the secondary MX to keep it from
becoming a SPAM relay for my domains.

I find myself completely torn. Can anyone give me their reasons for
using a secondary ... or not using?

Oh, btw. This is a small hosting provider setup with ~2000 domains
and ~100,000 msgs/day.

Thanks!
Ken