Re: how to make an intermediate machine receive mail while the destination is down?

[Joey Hess <joey@kitenet.net>]

Daniel Martin at cush wrote:
> Well, you'll need to modify your MX dns record to point to the new
> destination - you'll then need to tell the gateway machine that's
> holding the mail explicitly how to route it, or else the machine
> holding the mail will try to send it to itself, and mail will get
> caught in a loop.  How to do this depends on what mail software is on
> your gateway/dns machine.
> 
> But why bother?  If your main server is only going to be down for one
> or two days, then there shouldn't be any problem in simply not having
> something to hold the mail - if the sites sending the mail can't get
> through to your mail server, they'll just hold it until they can get
> through.  Typically, what will happen is that people trying to send
> mail to your site will only even notice that something's odd if your
> server is down for three days (in that case, the person who sent the
> mail will get something from their mail server saying "This message
> has been undeliverable for 3 days; we'll keep trying for another 9
> days"), and all the mail will get through if your main server is down
> for less than twelve.

Unfortunatly, there are exceptions to this. For example, if you are
subscribed to debian-user through this machine, you will be unsubscribed
after a few days of downtime. This is a highly annoying "feature" of
smartlist.

-- 
see shy jo


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