mail-archive.com was down for a number of hours today, as our ISP was doing some scheduled maintenance.
I believe all incoming email was routed to the secondary Mail Exchanger, which was recently set up by ddns.org. The secondary MX is able to store messages while the primary is down; i.e. it is a failover. The location of the secondary MX is offsite (Singapore, actually.) The location of the secondary DNS is also offsite, in Virginia. Primaries are in California. Anyway, things didn't go quite as smoothly as hoped. It appears I introduced a configuration error in the secondary MX for a fair portion of the downtime; thus some mail probably sent warning back after 4 hours. It's possible that during a brief period (20 minutes?) a bunch of mail bounced. Finally, no mail has been retrieved from the Singapore failsafe yet; we've had enough excitement for today - that will be a task for tomorrow. On the good side, the failover infrastructure is in place and should do its job correctly in the future - we are getting much more resistant to ISP or hardware failures. (Should such a calamity ever occur!) Access to the website is a different story - we are unmirrored and did go through downtime. This is less critical than a disruption of email service, but should be something to look into as the service gows. Jeff
