Backup MX or no?
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I'm going to be doing some email maintenance this weekend (moving Zimbra from Ubuntu to CentOS). I have a plan laid out and things should go smoothly, but we will still be down for a while. My plan of attack is so:
- Block mail related ports on existing server so no new mail comes in.
- Perform incremental backup of all mailboxes
- Restore backup to new server (this will take a while)
- Re-IP new server to match old
- Test send/receipt of mail
- If all is good, $profit
I suspect between the incremental backup and subsequent restore to the new server will take 4 or so hours. Add in 2 hours buffer for accommodating "unknowns" that come up (there is always a mailbox or two that fail to restore for some reason).
Do you think it would be worth setting up a backup MX to receive mail while we are down? Or is relying on the sending mail servers to retry/bounce if TTL is reached good enough?
I suppose there is equal risk of losing mail due to error on my part in configuring a backup MX (I've never done it before) as there is with mail servers that don't properly handle undeliverable messages. Also, I'd need to deal with spam on the backup MX too.
Thoughts?
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It's very cheap... I would.
If I was hosting email on-site I mean
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It's very easy to do, the only question is, how much mail do you need to clean before you release it onto your server? i.e spam.
If you have 20 or so users, it might not be so bad to skim through and delete the obvious ones.
If you have 200 users, well that becomes a job.
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@Breffni-Potter said in Backup MX or no?:
It's very easy to do, the only question is, how much mail do you need to clean before you release it onto your server? i.e spam.
If you have 20 or so users, it might not be so bad to skim through and delete the obvious ones.
If you have 200 users, well that becomes a job.
We have 400 mail accounts. So this gives me pause. Though, in theory, wouldn't my mail server handle the incoming messages from the backup MX as it would anything else?
Also, I'd need to set this up in-house. I'd love to jump on a cloud based service for this, but we're not there yet.
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I use Backup MX from No-IP. It's a little cheaper than the other one mentioned. It just spools your mail any time it is down.
If you host onsite it's a good service to have 24/7/365 anyway.
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Regardless of this project, if your going to host email on site, you should have a backup MX provider.
What do you do when the server fails, or you misconfigure something? Just lose mail? That seems like a bad plan.
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@aaronstuder said in Backup MX or no?:
Regardless of this project, if your going to host email on site, you should have a backup MX provider.
What do you do when the server fails, or you misconfigure something? Just lose mail? That seems like a bad plan.
Yeah ours has saved our bacon numerous times.
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@aaronstuder said in Backup MX or no?:
Regardless of this project, if your going to host email on site, you should have a backup MX provider.
What do you do when the server fails, or you misconfigure something? Just lose mail? That seems like a bad plan.
Depending on how something is misconfigured, you can still lose mail. I haven't experienced it personally, but I've heard of scenarios where a mail server was "accepting" mail, but the mail was lost. shrug
We've had a couple of outages before and just dealt with it. One was a mail server outage (it ran out of disk space the first week I was here), the other was an ISP outage. It's never been a big deal really. We let our users know what to expect when events occur.
Just trying to reach a good KISS balance. If a backup MX makes sense (which it's sounding like it might), then I'll do it.
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@anthonyh $30 a year seems like a no brainer to me. I can help you with DNS records if you need it.
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@anthonyh said
Depending on how something is misconfigured, you can still lose mail. I haven't experienced it personally, but I've heard of scenarios where a mail server was "accepting" mail, but the mail was lost. shrug
We've had a couple of outages before and just dealt with it. One was a mail server outage (it ran out of disk space the first week I was here), the other was an ISP outage. It's never been a big deal really. We let our users know what to expect when events occur.
I've had that happen, where our server ran out of disk space, but the server never stopped accepting e-mail.
I have since changed some settings, but it's definitely something I have seen. What happens to us much more frequently is an Internet outage.
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@aaronstuder said in Backup MX or no?:
@anthonyh $30 a year seems like a no brainer to me. I can help you with DNS records if you need it.
DNS is a non-issue. I'd just need to host whatever does backup MX for us on-site or invest in a AWS or Azure VM of some sort that I can control. For this purpose though something on-site would be fine.
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@anthonyh I think your confused... The backup MX service is already hosted... They just forward emails along to your server, unless your server is down then they store them.
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@aaronstuder said in Backup MX or no?:
@anthonyh I think your confused... The backup MX service is already hosted... They just forward emails along to your server, unless your server is down then they store them.
No, I'm not confused.
I understand that this only comes into play with our primary MX is down (or if a non-compliant SMTP server sends to our backup MX).
It's a matter of trust. Yes, they'll forward our mail to us when we're back up, but we have no control of what else they do with said data. It's a control issue.
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@anthonyh Ohhhhh. I see.
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@aaronstuder It's dumb, I know.
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Any reason you don't have an existing service for this? With in house email I would typically still have a service for this "out front". You could implement that now and problem solved.
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@scottalanmiller said in Backup MX or no?:
Any reason you don't have an existing service for this? With in house email I would typically still have a service for this "out front". You could implement that now and problem solved.
Nobody has ever thought it was a need. It hasn't really been an issue.
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This article was written around a specific mail platform, and is roughly 4 years old, but I'm curious on y'all's opinion. It's an argument against a secondary/backup MX.
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@anthonyh said in Backup MX or no?:
This article was written around a specific mail platform, and is roughly 4 years old, but I'm curious on y'all's opinion. It's an argument against a secondary/backup MX.
It brings up an interesting question that hopefully someone here can answer.
What does happen to a piece of e-mail that is sent when your server is down? Does it really go back to the sending server, and queue up to be retried?
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@BRRABill said in Backup MX or no?:
@anthonyh said in Backup MX or no?:
This article was written around a specific mail platform, and is roughly 4 years old, but I'm curious on y'all's opinion. It's an argument against a secondary/backup MX.
It brings up an interesting question that hopefully someone here can answer.
What does happen to a piece of e-mail that is sent when your server is down? Does it really go back to the sending server, and queue up to be retried?
I'm no expert, but my understanding is that SMTP was written with the idea that the Internet is not reliable. Therefore, RFC compliant SMTP servers should queue messages and periodically re-try sending for a period of time.
There is a bunch of info here (thanks, Google!): https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2821.txt
