Entry

Is there a way to setup two email providers to receive email for the same domain to protect against the failure of one?

Jan 9th, 2002 07:10
Kagan (Kai) MacTane, Jay Nayegandhi, Luis Arellano,

You would have multiple MX records setup for the domain pointing to 
different hosts.  If one was unavailable, multiple others could be 
contacted.
This is done in the primary DNS record for your domain. Each MX record
has a numerical priority associated with it, with lower numbers
representing higher-priority mail servers. For example:
   MX   10   primary.your-domain.tld
   MX   20   secondary.your-domain.tld
   MX   50   other.friendly-domain.tld
Note that the latter two hosts in that example (and especially the last
one!) must be configured to accept mail, but then forward it on for
final processing to your main mail server.
For wherever the mail is housed, there should be some backup/high 
availability/failover configuration for internal clients to connect.