Hi Martin,

I don't really understand how to test this issue, should I see the problem if I try to send a mail to the hydac.com or trench.fr domains?

Is the MTA obliged to failover to the second MX if it is actually making a connection to the first MX?  Would this more likely be considered an issue with the receiving SMTP server?

Kevin

Hi!

Same happens when the remote primary MX MTA answers with an error message, at least when the message is '421 Service not available, closing transmission channel.'. The new 8.0.0-24 doesn't even try to contact the otherwise functioning secondary MX. The previous version (7.7) did. Even a simple Win2k3 IIS SMTP server does. That's why I have to route my outgoing messages through a Windows box to get them delivered, but not for long: I'm downgrading, back to 7.7

From my point of view, a MTA should try to use the next higher MX to send its email if the delivery using the first MX fails! (Otherwise the second MX is totally useless!)

martin

It's not useless if the primary mx isn't responding....

Well, it's up to the local MTA to decide wether it should be using the secondary MX or not. If we accept Wikipedia as a reliable source of information,(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MX_record#The_backup_MX , look at the '
The preference debate'), there's no such constraint.
But as an end user, I want an MTA which does fall back.

Peter

I would love to see a configuration option that allows to configure Brightmail GW to use a second MX if the first doesn't accepts the mail.

I could see the use in having this as an option. The only thing is that 400 and 500 level errors are an authoritative answer. So as far as the MTA is concerned, it got its answer back from the MTA that it was trying to connect to. Unless we get no response, there would be no reason for the MTA to know whether or not to continue to look for a connection or not.

But the fact that we are looking at a simple DNS query, it wouldn't be too much overhead I wouldn't think for that to be included. But I don't know that for sure.

By the way it was brought up offline that if "You the people" would like to see things like this addressed, your best thing to do is to give us a call in support and get some cases behind this.

So if you feel so inclined, feel free to call and log a ticket.

Thanks for your time!