Way OT: SMTP/POP/IMAP (Whole mailserver, actually) redundancy

[Alex Neuman van der Hans]

I'm about to embark on several projects where having total email server
redundancy would be a good thing to have. The servers would be in
geographically separate locations.

I've considered using a secondary MX that forwards everything to a primary
(after processing by MS) and then rsyncs the mailboxes from the primary so
that if you go to, say, mail2.company.com you can get a basic webmail page
that lets you read the last known copy of the user's mailbox (and home
directory, etc.) before whatever failure (connectivity, hardware) took down
the primary. Problem would be that since the primary MX is supposed to
receive the mail, new mail after the failure would get stuck in the outgoing
queue on the secondary unless the configuration was changed so that mail is
delivered to local users on said secondary - and re-rsyncing the mailboxes
to the primary on reconnection.

I guess one could write a script that would test for the existence and
connectivity of the first server, and make the changes automatically; I
would have to be absolutely sure the primary is down by checking for several
conditions.

I'm sure there's probably an easier way without reinventing the wheel,
specially if I want to keep using Sendmail/MailScanner/etc.

Any thoughts? If it's too off-topic replies off-list are welcome. Thanks in
advance.

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