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zoneedit.com / DNS backup for email

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zoneedit.com / DNS backup for email
Was interested in zoneedit's DNS backup services for email. If your own DNS servers are down theirs kick in, capture your email, and retry your mail servers (forwarding on the collected mail) for up to 10 days, until your servers are back online. That way no mail is lost when your servers go down. After just having some downtime this looks like an excellent idea. Anyone else doing this?

I wrote to zoneedit's tech support but haven't received a reply back. Their site was awfully slow too last I tried. Wondered if there were any other recommended sites that offer similar services?

Jason
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Re: [wickedmoon] zoneedit.com / DNS backup for email In reply to
You shouldn't need this unless your servers are down for an extended period of time. Qmail default's to retrying mail for up to 1 week before it gives up. Sendmail retries for about the same I believe.

If you are looking at > 48 hrs of downtime though, it may be something to look into.

Cheers,

Alex
--
Gossamer Threads Inc.
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Re: [Alex] zoneedit.com / DNS backup for email In reply to
My site was down for over a week before. While I don't expect this to happen again, it is reassuring to have this kind of dns backup. But where to go? I'm not convinced by zoneedit as I signed up and didn't receive the confirmation email "within one hour of signing up" like it says on their site. My email to tech support hasn't been replied to either.

Jason
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Re: [Alex] zoneedit.com / DNS backup for email In reply to
In Reply To:
You shouldn't need this unless your servers are down for an extended period of time.
But not if all your dns servers are down. If all your dns servers are down (power outage, connection down, etc), then your host is unresolveable and the mailserver (qmail anyways) will give a permanent host unresolveable error. That's why you should host your dns servers on different connections Smile.

Adrian
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Re: [wickedmoon] zoneedit.com / DNS backup for email In reply to
They don't seem too reliable to me Smile. A better solution would be to get somewhere to be a secondary dns server (www.secondary.com is one of these).

Adrian
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Re: [Alex] zoneedit.com / DNS backup for email In reply to
AOL's default is only 4 days, Postfix's default is 5 days. Hotmail's is 3.

Many mail servers send warnings out after 4 hours - having a backup mail server catches mail and won't send a warning out for 2 days. And it extends your downtime before loss to 10 days.

Also, ZoneEdit provides secondary service. Our servers are fast, and because of DNS, mail and web failover services, our clusters experience very little downtime. Our main website currently does not have failover on it - which is an issue - but this does not impact our other services.

- Erik Aronesty
ZoneEdit, Inc.