Setting up a Backup Mail Server

Paul Howarth paul at city-fan.org
Tue Apr 19 16:05:15 UTC 2005


David Cary Hart wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-04-19 at 09:45 -0400, Reuben D. Budiardja wrote:
> 
>>Hello,
>>I have my own domain, let's say: myrealname.org. I already set up a mail 
>>server (mail.myrealname.org) and MX record for that domain, with MX = 10 and 
>>it works just fine.
>>
>>What I need help is with the following. 
>>I want to setup a backup mail server with MX = 20, so in case the main mail 
>>server is down, the backup mail server will collect the incoming mail. The 
>>backup mail server, let's call it myothermachine.org is on another network. 
>>How do I set up the backup mail server (using sendmail) to do the following
> 
> 
> You may want to think about that since backup mx is a spam magnet. These
> days servers re-try for long enough durations to eliminate the need for
> backup mx.

That's a good point; any backup MX should have exactly the same spam 
blocking setup as the main MX, and ideally, it should have knowledge of 
the valid users for the domain so that it can reject mail to invalid 
users and hence avoid generating backscatter (see also 
http://www.techzoom.net/paper-mailbomb.asp).

Paul.




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