Hi!

I do have an exchange server. What I want to do is to setup a secondary mail server which I will be adding MX 20 on my DNS entries so that if the MX 10 is down, mails will be received by this MX 20 server. My question is that should the MX 20 have the same useraccounts as the MX 10 mail server? Let's say I have 200 mail accounts in MX 10, does it mean I should also configure MX 20 to have the same 200 accounts? The next question is that how can I forward all messages received by the MX 20 to the MX 10 server? This is just a failsafe theory. I want to use Linux for this technology but I don't know how to do it.

if you basically want a "holding pen" for email until the main box is functional then you can use that secondary site just as a relay agent for a certain domain. it seems that this experience is covering a number of questions you have in a single solution. you won't need any mail accounts on the box, you just need to configure it to say that it will be allowed to relay domains for a certain period of time, and it will then try to forward it to a better MX when available. so the mail of the backup box won't be traditionallty "available" but will be being temporarily held in a location securely managed by yourself, and of course you're then at liberty to greatly increase the amount of time before a bounce occurs and such.

Hi acid_kewpie,

I am currently using xmail but don't know if it is supported. Do you know any MTA which can do this? Thanks.

well any of hte big unix ones will do it fine, postfix, exim, sendmail, qmail etc...

Okay thanks..In xmail, it only allows relaying of domain but I can't specify the period of time and where am I going to forward the mails. I guess I just have to setup another mta. Thanks again.