Configuring Postfix as a fallback server

mariourk

I'm having somewhat of a bandwidth problem. Sometimes the traffic peaks. When a mailserver is trying to deliver an email to my server at that time, the message won't come through and timeout. The sending mailserver will try it again some other time, but this causes a delay in my incoming messages. Sometime this can take several days.

What I would like to do, is install another sever somewhere else, that could act as a fallback. When the main-server is busy, emails should go to the fallback. The fallback than accepts and stores those messages and tries the hand them to the mainserver at a later time. The advantage is that I would have controll over the delay-time. And I can still recieve emails when the mainserver goes down.

The problem is, I have no idea how to configure Postfix as a fallback-server. With Google I couln'd find much of a good howto that describes how to do this. I also couldn't find anything on this forum.

I really hope someone can help me out here.

Thanks a lot anyway

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di1bert · l33t Joined: 16 May 2002 Posts: 963 Location: Oslo, Norway

We changed to Exim a while back but I did manage to find this which should do the same thing.

What you want to do is have your second fallback server accept mail for your domain, but not store
in in a mailbox, but rather just spool it. You can then use fetchmail to run ETRN against your fallback server
from your primary server when the load is a little lower.

Here's an example of the fetchmail file:

elgato319 · Guru Joined: 15 Sep 2005 Posts: 546

just setup a normal postfix mta

in main.cf

mariourk · Posted: Tue Jan 22, 2008 2:27 pm Post subject:

Thanks! I will try this.
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If there is one thing to learn from history, it's that we usualy don't learn anything from it, at all.