inbound email backup

The inbound email will be in the retry queue, and will be delivered once it is reachable.

well you can host a queue for your mail system outside your organization , may be at a service provider location and set the MX record for that queue to be just after that of your organization , that way  if your mail server goes down, mails will hold on the external queue untill your mail server is up again.

How is your Inbound configured. is it directly hitting your exchange server? or via some firewalll....
Most of the iSPs provide this service

is there a way I can do this on another service which does not have exchange but running some other software ?  If so what open source solutions can I find ?

I have a second server on an alternate ISP.  My primary domain is x.org the second server is on x.com.  If I setup smtp services on x.com server what do I need to do to have it act like a email relay server until x.org comes backup ?  Is there free software which will allow me do to what postfix will do on windows server ?

To confirm:  Are you looking for something like this or are you just looking to queue and then forward email once the Exchange service is back up?  

As ckeshav suggests any inbound email will sit in the senders queue and be periodically retried until the timeout if you are just worried about short outages.

I would perfer to quue on one of my other servers which is not part of the Active Directory and is connect to another isp.  Some of my senders are getting bounced messages so I want to eliminate that.

We use DNSMadeEasy, for our main wen server fail over as well as for Mail Bagging should our email server go down.  Good people, fairly inexpensive. http://www.dnsmadeeasy.com/

Although if you are just looking for MXBackup, check out Zonedit.com they are really inexpensive.  Only issue is that all sales and support are online, absolutely no phone service, but that said I hear great things about them http://www.zoneedit.com/backupMX.html 

But I want to do it on one of my servers and not contact with someone else.

What version(s) of Windows Server do you have available?

You can certainly do that yourself, but consider that if you lose your internet connection then all of your internal servers are not going to help you becuase they will have no connectivity and your emails will bounce, vs having a service with all sorts of failover capbilities handle it for you for less than 50 bucks a year

Actually you can get this service for about $ 12 per year from Zonedit http://www.zoneedit.com/pricing.html

Perhaps I dont understand something critical about your organization, but in short if you make another internal server store and forward the email you are not solbving the problem you are just moving it around.  But if thats what you want to do then I would just put in a SMTP server from Trend Micro or another vendor and have it recieve all the mail and the Exchange server would SEND and RECEIVE via the seperate SMTP server.  But again if your internet connection goes down, email will bounce UNLESS your ISP can provide you with MXBackup service, but usually they are going to charge you more then other 3rd party vendors.

Lucid.. I have 2 internet connections with 2 isps.  My second server is running server 2003 and I can put up a linux server if I need to.

what I need to know is:

How to Create a Backup MX Server using windows 2003 server.

ok so if you want to divert the traffic to your second ISP connection you still need to setup a DNS failover for your MX record, i.e. if IP # 1 is not available use IP # 2.  To do this effectivly I think you will again need a 3rd party service like Zonedit or DNSMadeEasy

why do I need an 3rd party service when I can set up smtp on the sercond server.  I just need to know what I need to do to set up smtp server so that it accepts all emails for the domain and when the primary server ways up that it will send it the email back to it.

Correct me if I am wrong but it sounds as though;

1. You have two different ISP links inbound
2. Currently your Exchange server sends and receives all emails, i.e. you do not have a separate SMTP server, correct?
3. Am I correct to also assume that your MX record points to the Exchange servers external IP address?

Is your concern

A. If your main Exchange server goes down emails will start bouncing to outside users as NDR
B. Or is it that you want to have business continuity, i.e. if the email server goes down you want an internal secondary server to take over so that users can continue on?

yes I do not currently have a second mx record.  I have multiple servers and only 1 runs exchange. I do not want outside users to get NDRs.  Internal users do not need to send email while its down.

My current MX record points to my network/exchange server on ISP 1. I have other server on that ISP and I have some servers on ISP 2.  When ISP1 is down I want email to pool on server on ISP2 until ISP1 is back up.

ok so if the IP address is down for the main exchange server and your MX record is pointing at that IP you need to first ensure that should the IP address the MX is pointing at fails that you have the ability to detect and fail over to a new IP address.  So who hosts the MX record that points at your Exchange server?

the server is hosted in our office ..  the MX is listing via Network solutions... i do not want to switch isps .. I want to have 2 MX records...One MX pointing to main server and the second pointing to my backup server which will pool the smtp records until main server is reconnected to the internet.

How do I configure the second server and how do I get the main server to request records from second server with out poping.

So are you saying that

1. you want to have a MASTER MX record that always points to your Exchange server and mail flows just fine

2. And a Fail-over Secondary MX record that sits and waits to receive email but ONLY if the Master fails?

3. Once the Exchange server comes back up you want the MASTER Record to take back over and the Slave/Fail-over box should push mail back to the Master record so that it flows back into Exchange?  

how do I configure an Server 2003 smtp which is not part of the active directory domain to make it hold the emails and  push the email back to the master MX.

I don't think what you want to do is really possible, and no offense but IMHO you are making this harder then it has to be.

1. Network solutions is currently hosting your MX record right?

2. Regardless of how you do this you are going to have to involve the party that host the MX record i.e. if its pointing at address # 1 and that address goes down mail will bounce unless you A. buy a MX Backup service from someone (Best IMO) or B. Configure your MS record to failover to another server should address 1 fail.

3. If you do option 2.A nothing changes on your local side, no NDR's easy peasy done and if you do 2.B then you need to configure another internal SMTP server to accept email, i.e. you would end up with SMTP1 and SMPT2 and mail could come from either location.  This is more complicated and would require your Exchange server to receive from either server.

4. The other option I suppose you could get something like an F5 Big IP and feed in multiple ISP routes but now you are talking super big money and even more complicated stuff.

BTW you don't have to change your ISP, its just who host your DNS and with one of the services I suggested it give you complete control, i.e. you can do failover services in 30 seconds, be replicated around the world etc all while someone else deals with the hardware.  FYI I am just talking about your external presence for DNS not all the internal items and if done right you have 0 downtime

Also you might check with Network Solutions to see if they have a MX Backup service.  They would probably charge you more then the services I mentioned but you would be done in seconds and have allot more redundancy and less headaches etc.

I have 2 ISPs... One is with comcast and it sometimes goes down.. but it is fast... the other is with cbeydon.  I use the cbeydon connection for an appliation which is web based. I have 2 mx records already..  10 which points to my server connect on comcast  and 20 which points to the my other server on cbeyond..  If a MX backup service can do it I should be able to do it too...  They dont have magic software...

Mail would not be sent out over the cybeond connection... I need to understand what I need to do on sever 2 with the smtp service.  Do I need to create all the users ids on it... ?  How will my main server ask the second server to send the email its holding... ?

Well really all thats happening with the service is they are the main route that stores and forwards the mail.  If the MX destination is unavailable then they hold onto it for X time or until the server comes back up.  You can certainly do it the way you want to I suppose.

So if you currently have two MX records setup then am I correct to assume that mail is currently flowing through either of the MX records at random and into your Exchange Server?  If not then thats what needs to happen, i.e.

1. Setup your exchange server to talk to the SMTP servers that MX1 and MX2 point to, i.e. tell Exchange it can receive mail from either server. MC 3 can be any type of SMTP based server.

2. Talk to Network solutions and ensure the mail bound for abcde.com can be delivered via MX1 or MX2 via round robin or failover that way it wont matter what link fails and Exchange will always accept mail from both.

I dont want exchange server to talk to mx1 and mx2.. I want mx1 to point to exchange server and mx2 to point to another server which is windows 2003 and has smtp server.  Server1 only has 1 isp connection.

When i Say MX 1 and MX 2 I wasn't implying that you would have two new servers so;

A. MX1 currently points at  the Exchange Server and all mail flows fine

B. MX2 will point to Server # 2 with an SMTP server

C. you will need to tell Exchange that it can accept mail inbound mail from the local SMTP connection OR the External SMTP connection.

D. Then you will need to talk to Network Solutions and configure it with them so that Mail will flow to MX1 by default but if not available then flow to MX2

I dont want to use an outside company.. I want to self host... dang

nothing wrong with self hosting - but that usually implies that your own inbound internet becomes a single point of failure.  You can provide a fairly low cost backup (get a consumer grade ADSL line in, directly connect its firewall/router to a backup mailserver, and don't use it for anything else other than inbound mail; you can then define that host as mx2.<domain> and add a mx record with a higher value to your dns. the box doesn't need to run anything extreme - low end workstation running a free MTA will do nicely (something like postfix or exim) as it won't be high traffic and just needs to hold onto the mail for a while until it can deliver it by mailer-table.