How can I set up a mail hop service?

I

IT_Architect

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I'm currently using DynDNS for these. They work fine. I wonder how much trouble it would be to set something like this up on a DA server or separate server. Anybody with any experience doing it or know of any scripts out there already available to implement a mail hop service?

Thanks!
 
I have clients with internal mail systems, such as Exchange, GroupWise etc. Since they are not located in major data centers on internet backbones our servers are, their connections are not as reliable. A Mail Hop server placed inside of a major data center queues the mail for them when their in-house mail server is not available from the internet. In your DNS, you normally set the priority to a higher number for the MX record for the mail hop server so smtp servers only contact the Mail Hop when it cannot contact the customer's mail server. Once the customer's in-house mail server is again available from the internet, the Mail Hop server sends the e-mail to their in-house server. This prevents SMTP servers sending e-mail to their domain from ever returning bounced messages.

In recent years, the Mail Hop is also being used in an additional role by setting the Mail Hop MX to a lower number than the customer's in-house e-mail server, and thereby having it scrub the e-mail of viruses and spam before sending it to the customer's in-house mail server.

The same situation applies to web servers where one could cover for another when one is unavailable.

Thanks!
 
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scsi said:
Definately something I have been looking for as well for quite a while. I found this:
Click to expand...
I took a look. That solves a different problem, but there are concepts there that may be able to used to do what we're after.

Thanks!
 
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It's quite easy to set up with or without DirectAdmin; the main problem is knowing who to NOT accept email for when the main server isn't available. Once you've figured that out, the rest is easy.

Jeff
 
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