I have an in-house Exchange 2003 Server. All of the workstations on the network use Outlook 2003.
I have a dedicated T1 line.
In addition, my ISP offers email, which I have configured as a back-up email server.
(My main MX record points to my Exchange Server, and my secondary MX record points to their server).
In the event that my T1 and/or my Exchange Server goes down, my mail gets directed to the 'catch-all' account on my ISPs mail server.
I use a third party utility that will, on regular itervals, connect to my ISPs mail server and, if there are any messages sitting there, it will download them and forward them to my Exchange Server.
This works pretty well.
But now my T1 line is down this morning. Of course, email works fine if I'm going to email my co-worker. However, because the T1 is down, we are cut off from outside email.
I'm sure any messages my co-workers send are being queued up on the Exchange Server. Likewise, any emails that are sent to us (from the outside) are being queued up on my ISPs mail server. As soon as the connection is back up, these messages should all go through without a hitch (Theoretically, anyway).
It would be nice if I could activate some sort of "backup" internet connection (even if it's dial-up!) for the SOLE PURPOSE of sending/receiving email through my Exchange Server.
Is this possible? I want to configure my Exchange server to "automatically switch to dial-up connection to send emails if the T1 line goes down"
I realize that because I will be connecting to the Internet through a dial up (and therefore a different IP), the outside world will still see my Exchang Server as "down", so incoming messages will go to my backup mail server. This is fine, becase while my server is using the dial-up connection to send outgoing emails, I can also let that third-party program log in to the backup mail server and pull down any messages.
I have about 35 email users so I know a dial-up connection would be painful, but again I only want to use it for email. They can live without Internet/Web browsing for a few hours while the T1 is down. ;-)
Thank you.
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