Secondary Mx records is one of the services we provide to our customers,
so I've been through this a lot. :) The typical secondary Mx record
falls into one of the two following categories:

1. A secondary entrance into your existing mail network. Offices in NY
and LA, an Mx record which points to each with one being the higher
preference. In the event one link is unavailable mail is routed to the
other and then dispersed throughout the network

2. More commonly, it is a store and forward server which has been
configured to accept mail for foo.com and either uses DNS to try and
forward that mail to the higher preference Mx record or has been
specifically configured to forward all mail for foo.com to a specific
host or IP address. 

-----Original Message-----
From: Mike Anderson [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 
Posted At: Thursday, May 29, 2003 9:22 AM
Posted To: swynk
Conversation: The real story with Secondary MX
Subject: The real story with Secondary MX


Hello,

This is still a mystery to me.  Could somebody explain, or point me in
the right direction, as to how this all REALLY works?  And also, to make
sure things are configured correctly (on the secondary server)?

What is the overall process, on how mail gets routed - and the criteria
that has to be met, before a Primary mail server is given up on, and
then gets sent to the secondary server?

Obviously, it all begins with DNS - you have preferences using numbers.
The lower the number, the higher the priority the Mail Server is.  So,
the first MX gets a setting like '10', and the secondary MX gets a
setting like '20'.

Once that is done - what really happens, if in fact, the primary server
is unreachable?  Does the secondary Mail Server actually need to have
all the User Accounts and Domains that the first server has in order to
accept messages?  OR, does it accept literally everything, and then
spools the mail, once the Primary Mail Server is reachable again.  And
that leads me to the next question - how does the secondary Server know
that it just accepted mails (temporarily) for a primary server, and that
it's supposed to periodically contact the Primary - so it can offload
all the mail it's been accumulating this whole time?

If somebody could explain the whole process, or refer me to an article
of some type, I would be very grateful.

Thanks in advance,

Mike

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