On Email Spooling, MX records, and hosting

there are several providers who offer website and email hosting. they offer different type of plans. so depened on your needs and how many emails you want and the size needed. for example fatcow.com offer plans for $100 a year with 100 emails and hosting a website in addition to some ftp and other service. many others offer similar plans with different prices.

But I would recommand that since you have a server with static ip, then leave it on all the time. that way you won't have problems with space as it is the number 1 problem if you are using third party provider. you can also have another mail server for when the other server is down.

hope this helps!

You DON'T want spooling.  Let the sender's server queue the mail and retry later.  That way, when your server comes back online, the sender's server connects to yours and gives you the mail.  The key is if any of it is addressed to a non-existant address, it gets rejected.

If you spool, the spooling server ends up accepting all of that mail, and then has to deal with the bounceograms (which are often useless anyway).  Worse, spammers will send to your spooling server even when your primary server is reachable, bogging it down further.

"The key is if any of it is addressed to a non-existant address, it gets rejected."

Would not this be the case in spooling as well?  Spooling (correct me if I'm wrong) is simply a second MX record of lesser priority, where another company hosts the server that MX record points to.  It simply colllects mail and tries to "push it".  If an address doesn't exist on our server, it gets bounced, spool or no spool.

If the address doesn't exist on your server, it gets bounced.

A spooling server is (as you said) a second MX of lesser priority, configured to RELAY mail to your domain(s) BUT NOT ACCEPT THE MAIL LOCALLY (it doesn't have the mailboxes available to it).

If an email to a non-existant address arrives on the spooling server, it must accept it, since it doesn't know the list of legitimate addresses, then send it to your primary server, at which point it gets bounced, and the spooling server has to try to send the bounceogram back to the sender.  Your spooling server is now doing the work that the spammer's server had to do before.  That's bad.

I respectfully disagree with pjtemplin :)   I understand what he's saying, but you're not eliminating any work for your server since it still has to send the delivery failure.  Yes, the spooling server has added load, but who cares?  You're paying for the spooler/spam filtering service, plus they know what they're getting into and have the infrastructure to support it.  Not all incoming email is spam, almost but not quite ;-)  Without a lesser priority MX record there to hold your mail, you could potentially bounce back valid messages to valid senders.  Now they're wondering why your company is rejecting mail and I don't think that looks real good for your company.  With a spooler, you can have down time and no one is the wiser.  You're not racing the clock so you get back up before delivery failures get sent back to valid senders.  Highly recommended!

thank you both for your very informative posts.  Having the point-counterpoint really helps me have all the tools I need to make an informed decision.  I have to assign an "accepted answer" so I will default to the first answer.

thanks again.