I'm moving to linode from Rimu hosting. One feature that Rimu had that was nice was that they provided a backup mx server that would receive and hold email if your VM was down. Does linode.com have a backup server? I can't find it listed in the documentation. If not, does anyone know of anyplace that offers a backup mx server for low-volume email?

Thanks,
Geoff

I don't believe linode offers this. Many domain registrars do, though. Have you checked with yours?

Would be nice if Linode offered this (wink, wink) but it is not offered from what I've seen either.

I use dnsmadeeasy.com, but the price has gone up significantly recently ($18.95/year for one domain) and you can probably find other places cheaper now. I'm grandfathered in at the $7.95 rate. I was looking around recently and it looks like other providers are running even higher than dnsmadeeasy.com. Dyndns.com and no-ip.com are some of the ones I looked at.

Of course the other option is to see if anyone is reading this with a Linode at a different data center and running a mail server, configuring each other's servers as a MX backup should be pretty easy (and cheap).

Give Rollernet a try. I've used them now for about two years and couldn't be happier.

They also have free accounts available.


-Eric

This is interesting. It would be great if linode could offer this service, although rollernet looks like a great system (and well priced).

Can I clear something up please... I presume mail is ONLY ever sent to the backup MX mail server (e.g. MX preference 20) if the primary MX server (e.g. preference 10) is down or not responding?

Correctly behaving mail servers behave as you suggest.

Spammers commonly send mail to backup mail exchangers first as backups often have less spam filtering.

Thanks! I see rollernetwork offer spam filtering so one can reject/discard spam messages... think I may well use their service. Looks very good.

I don't understand why people insist on using backup MX.

Mail servers simply queue emails while your server is down and retry until it comes up again or a 5 days period elapses. The backup MX does exactly the same. So you basically gains nothing using them.

In fact you have everything to lose :
you have to deactivate your SPAM filtering rules for them (or risk bouncing mails that you would have cleanly rejected see backscattering below) so you are weakening your antispam mechanisms, and you become a backscatter source. They can't verify that an adress is valid (they accept everything for your domain, at least when you are down) and you must bounce the garbage which is forwarded to you... This is called backscattering (the return adress is often forged and becomes a SPAM target) and can get you blacklisted as a SPAM source.

1. Users don't get a confusing email that says their mail is delayed. Many novice users think their mail was completely rejected. Also unprofessional if you are running some sort of business operation.

2. Backup MX servers can deliver to primary sooner than the normal 4 hour/5 day timeout.

3. Some backup MX services like rollernet.us allow you to explicitly set a list of valid users.

Another vote for Rollernet, been with them since Feb 06.

They also offer DNS services, primary and secondary