? About Priority of Mail Servers

bgarlock · Post by **bgarlock** » Wed Oct 12, 2005 1:34 pm

I have my mail servers setup so that the primary, is our in house mail server, with secondary MX from rollernet. Here is how things look:

bash-2.05a$ dig garlockprinting.com mx

; <<>> DiG 9.2.1 <<>> garlockprinting.com mx
;; global options: printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 38071
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 3, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;garlockprinting.com. IN MX

;; ANSWER SECTION:
garlockprinting.com. 14400 IN MX 10 mail2.rollernet.us.
garlockprinting.com. 14400 IN MX 5 garlock.dyndns.org.
garlockprinting.com. 14400 IN MX 10 mail.rollernet.us.

;; Query time: 58 msec
;; SERVER: 64.202.97.2#53(64.202.97.2)
;; WHEN: Wed Oct 12 14:32:44 2005
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 126

I would like all mail to goto garlock.dyndns.org, which has a priority of 5. Sometimes, I think that rollernet gets mail, and then forwards it to my mailserver, even though my mail server is up.

What affects this, and how can I always have mail go to my primary first, as long as it is up and running? Before I became a rollernet customer, I confirmed that mail did not always go to my primary, by setting up another account with another provider, and add an email address, and have the same account on both mail servers. Even when my primary was up, and running, sometimes mail would get delivered to my "test" account!

Should I increase the 10 to 100 or something?

Thanks for any help...

- Bruce

Post by **RollerNetSupport** » Wed Oct 12, 2005 1:46 pm

This is quite common, and it usually happens when the sending server decided that it didn't get a response fast enough, so it moves to the next set of MX records. The other time it happens is when spam mailers try all MX records in the hope that one of them will accept the message.

As far as forcing the primary to be used when it is up, there is no way to do this with DNS. To a mail server, the difference between 5 and 10 is the same as 5 and 100. The 5 is primary, and 10 or 100 is secondary. We are working on a new feature that can be used to address this issue (outside of DNS) when using our MX services for backup. Look for an announcement soon.

bgarlock · Post by **bgarlock** » Wed Oct 12, 2005 1:56 pm

Great! Thanks for the clarification. Will an announcement be made on this board when you have a solution to this issue?

Best regards,

Bruce

Post by **RollerNetSupport** » Wed Oct 12, 2005 2:06 pm

Yes, we'll announce it here first and later through email. I like to keep the mass-mail volume down, so multiple service announcements end up combined into one email.

vanslyck · Post by **vanslyck** » Sun Sep 17, 2006 8:28 am

I've also noticed that quite a few of my emails are being sent through rollernet even though my server is up and running. Has a solution been found yet?

Thanks!
Carolyn

Post by **RollerNetSupport** » Sun Sep 17, 2006 8:57 am

We are planning to add a feature that would poll your mail server to see if it is responding, and enable or disable mail domains accordingly. However, this feature has moved down the priority list.

kthomas · Post by **kthomas** » Tue Sep 19, 2006 2:21 pm

In my opinion this feature should have a very low priority ...

I