sendmail and backup mail server

gsimpson · 07-11-2003, 11:37 AM

I recently installed Sendmail 8.12 as my companies mail server. Our ISP has a backup mail server and I am wondering if I need to add something to my sendmail configuration so that we will receive the mail from that server should our in house server ever go down.

Pcghost · 07-11-2003, 11:49 AM

Without Sendmail in place how does your company connect/retrieve mail from your ISP?

gsimpson · 07-11-2003, 02:38 PM

We had an old Eudora Worldmail server which we swapped out for for the Sendmail server.

Pcghost · 07-11-2003, 02:41 PM

Right but say your sendmail server fails. Will you then have to configure each client machine to connect to the ISP's server, or can you run a backup server running postfix/sendmail/fetchmail etc to retrieve and distribute.

I guess I don't understand your question. Are you looking to create a "backup" mail server in-house?

gsimpson · 07-11-2003, 08:26 PM

I think the more appropriate term might be that it serves as a buffer; periodically I see messages in the maillog that it is relaying messages to our machine.

dorkowitz · 07-11-2003, 09:08 PM

if you just want a backup server to get mail, if your server goes down, all you need to do is set up 2 MX records for your domain.

ie - linuxquestions.org in MX 10 smtp.linuxquestions.org
linuxquestions.org in MX 50 smtp.yourisp.org

smtp.linuxquestions.org in A 192.xxx.xxx.xxx

this will sets priority on the Mail Exchanger, so that it will attempt the 10 first, then the 50 -- ie if 10 does work.

hope this answers your question.

gsimpson · 07-11-2003, 09:11 PM

So I shouldn't need to set anything in sendmail to enable it to accept mail from this server?