On Fri, Jun 22, 2001 at 03:13:06AM +0100, John P wrote:
> Our qmail system is situated on a particularly unreliable (at the moment)
> ADSL line, and we've had an outage for about 24 hours. I have set up a
> mailkeep.com account, and ensured it will collect mail for the relevant
> domains.
>
> Can I just specify their machine as a secondary MX in my DNS config?
No, not unless you've arranged with them to be a secondary mail exchanger for
your domains. (Is that what mailkeep.com does? I'm not familiar with them.)
> How can we then get our qmail system to pull in all the mail from the
> secondary account? There were all sorts of methods mentioned on that system
> eg. pop, smtp, etrn and others. Should I set up a cron job to check every 15
> minutes or so? What program do I use to pull in the mails? Is it transparent
> to the user? Got a bit confused really :)
If everything is configured correctly, when your connection comes back up you
don't have to do anything but sit back and wait for the mail to start coming
in. A secondary mail exchanger accepts your mail from the outside world and,
finding that there's a better-preference mail exchanger (i.e. yours) than it
itself, queues the mail for eventual delivery to that mail exchanger; it
doesn't deliver the mail locally and then expect you to come get it. It'll just
keep trying to deliver the queued mail to your mail server (until it times out,
at which point it'll bounce it).
If you don't have a secondary mail exchanger at all, the situation is not much
different, except that all the mail that's undeliverable because your line is
down will be queued on various mail servers around the Internet, instead of on
your secondary mail exchanger.
Chris
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