mailenable and ISP mail account and back up

doa · Post by **doa** » Mon Sep 30, 2002 2:37 pm

Ok I have two questions and I guess one statement

statement : Great program!!!!

question 1:can I use mailenable to pick up mail from my ISP's mail server? (it's just so slow I would love to use mailenable to pick it up and send it out.)

question 2: If one want to run a backup mail server can ou use mailenable for that also? (a friend and I use both run a mail server and I would like to back him up as well he will back me up that way if one of us is down the other can handle the mail till we are back up. I do know that you have to set secound mail MX but would like to know how ?!

thanks
D.O.A

Post by **MailEnable** » Tue Oct 01, 2002 4:18 am

Thanks,

Providing backup mail services should be as simple as adding the domain under a Postoffice and configuring a Smart Host to the IP addresses of the target mail server. You can then modify DNS and create an additional MX and PTR entry for the new server. (See knowledge base on which entries to create for hosted domains).

Now for the caveats! - This really only buys you time. Messages notifications will be generated to let the user know that mail is being held at an intermediary routing point; and, if the smarthosted server is not online within 30 hours (which is the default message expiration lifetime set by MailEnable), it will be bounced back to the sender. You can change the 30 hours to something greater and optionally remove the setting to generate message delay notifications. (See SMTP Properties in MMC Administration Console).

Note: This applies only for inbound mail for the domain. Providing a backup SMTP Server is "somewhat" more complicated and would involve using clustering between the two servers. Eg: NLBS - which creates a virtual IP to identify the two servers .... etc ...