Post
by Mort » Sat Apr 21, 2012 6:35 pm
Thanks jokiin,
I am aware of all of the pros and cons of having a backup mx. Some of the items listed there are not really "fair" arguments and seem like they are from someone who has a personal grudge against backup MX or something.
I know about the issues around SPAM, and the possible options that can be used to reduce it. I host my own email on Exchange, partly because it gives me greater control for my 4 domains, means I'm not limited by how many "hosted" email addresses I can have, but it is also a "learning" tool for me. I am an IT consultant and Exchange is one of the products I work with, so running my own in a production capacity give me certain experiences from an operational sense that you don't get by going into clients, installing, and walking away.
For the most part I was just trying to find out if an offering was even available, and at what price. I think the backup MX Exetel offering might be what I'm looking for, but I don't understand why it is listed as "unlimited email addresses" as that should be irrelevant to a store-forward backup MX server. If that means "unlimited domains" then that would make more sense. As it stands I am still waiting to find out if $50/year is per domain or not.
I've not really needed to think about it over the last 7 years I've been with Exetel, but my current outage is the longest I've experienced, and there is currently no expected time before it is resolved. *That* is a concern as while sending servers will hold onto mail and attempt redelivery for a time, usually that doesn't mean 5 days, and that is where a backup MX would come in handy.
In this case, what would be ideal is that I can configure my MX records to have a pointer to the Exetel backup MX, but I only enable the backup when needed for extended periods of time. I'm not running a big business or anything so an outage of 1/2 a day wouldn't be an issue, but if I knew it was going to be down any longer I could just enable the backup and at least ensure mail isn't NDR'd.
What is interesting in that article though is the use of backupmx and secondarymx interchangeably. They are "similar" in purpose, but both terms means different things and not necessarily the same thing.
As we know, there are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know we don't know.