Enhancements for Emergency Mail Boxes

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mjy78
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Joined: Thu Jan 17, 2008 3:25 am

Enhancements for Emergency Mail Boxes

Post by mjy78 »

I currently my client's domains in Secondary MX mode and I have a process running on their primary mail server that uses the Rollernet API to keep the Recipient Map list in sync with our SMTP addresses.

If (or maybe even when) they have server downtime, our plan is to switch the domain service mode at Rollernet from "Secondary MX" to "Hosted Mail Domain". At the moment the catch with this is that we need to make sure we first have created hosted mailboxes for all our SMTP addresses to ensure we do not lose mail.

A nice enhancement would be that rollernet detects when the domain service mode is changed from "Secondary MX" to "Hosted Mail Domain" and prompts the user to see if they would like mailboxes created automatically for each entry in their recipient map list for that domain. If the user chose to do this, then Rollernet could just auto generate passwords, as we could manually change passwords on individual mailboxes when a user needed to get to their email while our primary server was down.

Then when changing mode from "Hosted Mail Domain" back to "Secondary MX", it would be good if Rollernet could prompt and ask to re-queue all emails that are in the mailboxes, so they would then go through to our primary email server.

An alternative enhancement to the above changes would be if Rollernet could just provide a new API to allow hosted mailboxes to be created and removed. I could then modify our process so that it would create a mailbox in addition to adding an entry to the recipient map when a new email address is created on our server. I could then also make sure our process pops off any emails in the rollernet mailboxes when our server comes back online.

Either way, the value of this enhancement is that if any of my clients have downtime on their mail server, they only need to worry about changing one thing at rollernet if they wish to get emergency access to their emails, rather than having to know to first create mailboxes and risking loss of mail if they miss one.

Regards,
Michael.
RollerNetSupport
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Post by RollerNetSupport »

We are aware the that API is a bit behind in keeping up with changes we make - that's mainly because it isn't the most popular part of our service. However, we will bump it up on the priority list and get some support for the features that don't have any API support.

We can probably have the system do a one-to-one mapping of whatever it has in the valid user table and automatically create mailboxes at the time of switchover to hosted mode. That isn't a far-fetched problem to solve. Re-injecting messages delivered to mailboxes, however, is a bit more difficult since the mail servers don't have the queue file anymore, and the message would have to be fetched from the box and re-injected as if it were a new email. We will look in to this.

Thanks for the suggestions!
Technical Support support@rollernet.us
Roller Network LLC
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