When your mail server is offline and someone tries to send you an email, the message will bounce back to the sender. In today's fast paced environment customers don't have time to figure out why your company isn't receiving email. This translates into lost revenue, something no company can afford.
Your mail server has crashed, your T-1 is down or your internal network is experiencing difficulties. If this happens during normal business hours your IT staff is probably frantically attempting to restore service meanwhile your customers are unable to communicate with your staff. If this happens after hours, on the weekend or during a holiday possibly the problem goes unnoticed by your IT staff but, your customers quickly figure out your systems are down when they attempt to send you or your staff an email. Even with multiple internal mail servers, a failure of your Internet connection or electrical power will render your internally redundant systems unavailable and inaccessible.
Without a redundant, geographically diverse mail server several things could happen:
Email will bounce (returned to the sender)
Users find bounced Emails very frustrating -- this is bad for your image and is easily avoidable.
User Confusion
If incoming email bounces, the sender will receive a 'bounced email' in return. Most users won't spend the time figuring out what the difficulty is -- they will move on to another company whose infrastructure is up and running. A possible loss of a new customer or potential sale.
Your Email will clog-up the sender's Email server
An unnecessarily poor reflection on the quality of your e-communications infrastructure.
Problems for your e-commerce web site
It is common for e-commerce web sites to communicate orders to you via Email. These systems do not respond well to returned Email.
The Solution
With SecurityMinded providing your company a single or multiple backup mail server(s) incoming email will be received and stored -- even if your mail server is offline. Customers do not receive bounced email messages, your e-commerce web site will continue to function as designed and your IT staff will have the time necessary to correct the problem - without the fear of bounced emails. Our standard service stores your mail for up to 30 days and will reattempt delivery every 15 - 30 minutes until your mail server returns online.
Let SecurityMinded store your incoming mail so your IT staff can focus on resolving the problem. This also allows your IT staff the time necessary to perform maintenance on the mail server which may include taking the machine offline. Our backup mail server is available to store your email 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for as little as $60.00 a year.
Can you afford not to invest in this cost effective service?
Detailed pricing information for the Backup Mail Service is available HERE.
Discussion
When an email is sent an email server looks up to see which server handles mail for the domain using DNS MX records. MX records specify which server(s) control mail for a given domain. Each MX record is given a priority, the lowest being the primary mail server. Mail delivery is first attempted on the
lowest numbered priority, if it cannot connect to that one it tries the second lowest priority and so on. If no mail servers can be reached then mail is then bounced back to the sender.
Features
SecurityMinded provides a secondary mail server(s) (commonly called "store and forward") to store your email in the event your primary mail server is offline for any reason. Once your primary mail server returns online your mail will be delivered to you. Our server(s) will continue to attempt to deliver your mail every 15 minutes for a period of 30 days. If you require the ultimate in redundancy SecurityMinded offers two (2) additional backup mail servers to ensure no two (2) single points of failure exist. Should your mail server and our mail server be offline at the same time your mail is stored on our additional mail server located a thousand miles away and connected to diverse Internet providers.
Technical Implementation
Once you purchase a SecurityMinded backup SMTP account, our engineers will work with you and your IT staff to configure your DNS zone(s). Each DNS zone (domain name) has a MX (mail exchanger) record which specifies which mail server(s) will receive mail for a given domain. Each MX record is given a priority, the lowest being the primary mail server. Mail delivery is first attempted to the lowest numbered priority mail server. If the sending mail server is unable to connected to the lowest numbered priority mail server, it will then attempt to deliver the mail to the second lowest priority mail server and so on.
If no mail servers can be reached then mail is bounced back to the sender.
An example of this is the domain yahoo.com
Using the dig tool from
geektools.com lets take a look at the mail servers for the domain yahoo.com.
Enter "yahoo.com" in the "Domain" Field
Select "MX mail exchanger records) for the "Type"
Press the "Dig" button
From the results we can see the following:
;; ANSWER SECTION:
yahoo.com. 534 IN MX 1 mx1.mail.yahoo.com.
yahoo.com. 534 IN MX 1 mx2.mail.yahoo.com.
yahoo.com. 534 IN MX 5 mx4.mail.yahoo.com.
We now know from the "ANSWER SECTION" the domain yahoo.com has three (3) mail servers. Two primary mail servers (mx1.mail.yahoo.com and mx2.mail.yahoo.com) and a secondary mail server (mx4.mail.yahoo.com).
In the above scenario incoming mail will be delivered to either mx1 or mx2.mail.yahoo.com. If both of these mail servers are inaccessible incoming mail will be delivered to mx4.mail.yahoo.com.
With the SecurityMinded Backup SMTP solution, we will assist you in the configuration of your DNS zone. Once the changes are in place your domain records will show your mail server plus one or two of our secondary mail servers.
Detailed pricing information for the Backup Mail Service is available HERE.
