Alonso Consulting was asked if it was possible to have a backup mail server outside their office in case their primary failed or the connection was down. We answered in the affirmative and created a solution that automatically works if their Exchange 2003 server goes off-line for any reason. We did this by creating a secondary MX record at their DNS host. This record was pointed to one of Alonso Consulting's MDaemon e-mail servers. We configured the server with their domain (backup.theirdomain.com) and account information. Then each account was set to forward mail back to the IP address of the primary server. This automatically routes all the e-mail back to the Exchange Server once the server is back online. As an extra customer friendly step, we provided all users with a web address and login information so that they could access their e-mail from a working connection until their Exchange Server was back on-line.

Alonso Consulting