Re: [exim] Is a secondary MX worth the effort?

On 11/7/07, Ken Price <kprice@???> wrote:
>
> > One of the things I've considered for #2 is having a secondary MX
> > which is configured to give back a 4xx for everything.
> > However, I don't know if there are sending hosts who would fail to
> > go back to the primary MX when it came back up.
> >
>
> This is an interesting idea and I feel like an idiot for not thinking
> of it myself - course that's why we have these lists :-) Does anyone
> know how effective this method may be? I like it because of it's
> simplicity, low/no maintenance, and ridiculously low system
> requirements. I could have one or more $15/month VPS servers running
> in this role.
>

We have this kind of setup for about a year now and never experienced
any problems. As many spam-senders tend to use the backup-MX for spam
delivery, our 4xx-MTA catches a lot of spam. If you "tail -f" the
logs, you only see suspicious hosts connecting. It also decreased the
load on the primary servers.

Chris