5 ms·

What is it if anything that happens if my internet cuts out at my home, should I instead use some sort of hosting provider for my mail server?

• OJFord 10y ago
  > What is it if anything that happens if my internet cuts > out at my home, You bounce any incoming emails in that period, and (obviously) can't send any. > should I instead use some sort of hosting provider > for my mail server? I suppose that's a trade-off against how reliable you consider your ISP and electricity supply, and the volume or importance of email you'd be likely to receive in such a period.
  • teddyh 10y ago
    Bounce? No. The servers trying to send mail to your server will retry for up to, typically, four or five days, before they bounce the mail back to the sender. Mail was written to be resilient against network downtime.
    • robertely 10y ago
      That's why you soft bounce. It tells the sender that you can't receive the email _at this time_.
      • philtar 10y ago
        Pretty sure you can't do anything when you're not connected to the internet.
        • bigp3t3 10y ago
          That's why sending mta's should resend. Think sendmail does this every few hours or so
        • sbierwagen 10y ago
          A connection timeout is a soft bounce. https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5321#section-4.5.4.1 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5321#section-4.5.4.1 The sender MUST delay retrying a particular destination after one attempt has failed. In general, the retry interval SHOULD be at least 30 minutes; however, more sophisticated and variable strategies will be beneficial when the SMTP client can determine the reason for non-delivery. Retries continue until the message is transmitted or the sender gives up; the give-up time generally needs to be at least 4-5 days. It MAY be appropriate to set a shorter maximum number of retries for non- delivery notifications and equivalent error messages than for standard messages. The parameters to the retry algorithm MUST be configurable.
    • OJFord 10y ago
      Ha, I wrote that so cautiously, thinking "I'm sure this terminology's not right, I'll probably be called out on it"! Thanks though, I learned something :) Regardless of what we call it - the sender would get a copy back with a message not containing the word 'bounce' that says it failed to send, right?
      • teddyh 10y ago
        No, no message will be sent until after 4-5 days have passed without connection.
• benev 10y ago
  It's usually a bad idea to run email from a home internet connection because it massively increases the chances of your mail being marked as spam. The hardest part of running a mail server is making sure your mail gets through spam filters, and the IP is critical to this.
• MatthewWilkes 10y ago
  My ISP has a nice service, called tertiary MX. It's a MX server to add at the lowest priority that will accept emails into a queue that attempts to delivery to the primary MX every 15 minutes for a month.
• simon_acca 10y ago
  I forgot to mention that I use the abovementioned setup on a dedicated server, while also setting up a secondary MX dns record for bouncing the mail in case of malfunctioning as sister comments suggested.