Backup/Secondary MX

[freaky@]

Hey there,

can plesk be used to set it up as a secondary/backup MX? Some of our customers host their own mailserver on their internet connection. We'd like to be backup/secondary MX in case their line is down, so people sending mail won't get delayed messages and such.

Doubt it's possible from within plesk tho', only see enable/disable and when disabled it doesn't appear to function as backup/secondary mx.

 

[faris]

Doing this is very easy thankfully.

1) Add an additional MX record for the domain to point to your Plesk server. Give it a lower priority (which equates to a higher number) than the original MX record.

2) Manually edit (or create when doing it the first time) /var/qmail/control/morercpthosts and add the name of the domain to it (e.g. mydomain.com)

3)Manually edit (or potentially create) /var/qmail/control/smtproutes and add:
domain.com:x.x.x.x:25 where x.x.x.x is the IP of the customer's own server/dsl connection. The :25 is optional.

4) Restart qmail.

5) TEST!!!

NOTE ABOUT STEP 2: Step 2 may not work by itself. You may need to run qmail-newmrh
(qmail-newmrh reads the instructions in /var/qmail/control/morercpthosts and writes them into /var/qmail/control/morercpthosts.cdb in a binary format suited for quick access by qmail-smtpd.)

Alternatively just add the domain.com:x.x.x.x:25 directly into rcpthosts but keep in mind that this file may get overwritten at some point. Having said that this is what I ended up doing.

WARNING: Spammers tend to send to the last defined MX record hoping it has less spam filtering. other spammers send to the A record of the domain name, again hoping to bypass spam filters.

Please see http://forum.swsoft.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=11515 for more info on everything.

NOTE: Use my instructions at your own risk. AND BACKUP.

Faris.

 

[freaky@]

Thanks for the re'.

I already was afraid Plesk didn't support it. Whilst I might be (easily) able to do this, my collegues aren't familiar with CLI/linux and our customers don't even have access to it (nor would anyone want them to have write access to those files).

Besides that, it's quite error prone I guess.

Will be filing a feature request I suppose.

Anyways thanks for the solution, who knows when it might come in handy.