I have seen this ability but have never been able to implement it myself. When I worked at an I.T. Outsourcing company, one of the features we used or offered either permanently or temporarily for our many clients was the ability to have a clients emails qued to our Exchange server when their Exchange server was down. Example: Outsource.com has an Exchange 2003 server running. ClientA.com also has an Exchange 2003 server running. ClientA.com want to have all their emails route to Outsource.com and be held there if ClientA.com's Exchange server goes down for any reason, any time, and have those emails delivered once ClientA.com's Exchange server is back online. I have even seen Webhosts and ISP's offer this and you have to create or import your entire user/dist. group email accounts to them. It works well, but how would I get my Exchange server to offer this to other servers and vice versa? I know only about the MX record and having a primary and secondary priority mail route. Thanks!

You don't need an Exchange server to do that, you can use a simple Windows 2003/2008 server's SMTP service for that. You don't need to create GAL replication for this to work. If you want to do it with Exchange: 1. Add a recipient policy that won't match any of your recipients with the other domain, making sure your Exchange organization is NOT responsible for all mail to that domain, i.e., it is non-authoritative. 2. Create an SMTP Connector with that domain, and a smart host to the other domain's Exchange server's IP address. 3. Create a higher preferece value (higher cost) MX record that directs the other domain to your Exchange server. If the other domain's server is down, mail will route to your Exchange server, which will queue it up until the other server is back up. A caveat is that your server might get a lot of their spam becuase a lot of spammers send to secondary SMTP servers, figuring they might be less well protected. Is this really necessary? Most e-mail servers will try to send for a couple days before bouncing the mail. -- Ed Crowley MVP "There are seldom good technological solutions to behavioral problems." . "venom66" wrote in message news:e77e9e9c-6adb-46de-9124-e31d45c1d21e... I have seen this ability but have never been able to implement it myself. When I worked at an I.T. Outsourcing company, one of the features we used or offered either permanently or temporarily for our many clients was the ability to have a clients emails qued to our Exchange server when their Exchange server was down. Example: Outsource.com has an Exchange 2003 server running. ClientA.com also has an Exchange 2003 server running. ClientA.com want to have all their emails route to Outsource.com and be held there if ClientA.com's Exchange server goes down for any reason, any time, and have those emails delivered once ClientA.com's Exchange server is back online. I have even seen Webhosts and ISP's offer this and you have to create or import your entire user/dist. group email accounts to them. It works well, but how would I get my Exchange server to offer this to other servers and vice versa? I know only about the MX record and having a primary and secondary priority mail route. Thanks! Ed Crowley MVP "There are seldom good technological solutions to behavioral problems."

Thank you for the message. It seems necessary because many time I have seen an email server down and when people outside the org try to email it, they will get a bounce back right away stating the "Email server was unreachable". I have been told that email servers will retry to send an email, but from my experience this isn't true. I can see why this would not be, perhaps you are emailing someone for a bid on a project, imagine that you didn't know the recipient email server was down, 2 days pass, your email reaches the recipient who already picked someone for the job. If you got an email rejection notice rather quickly, you would know, and could call in to discuss the bid. So I think it is a myth to assume email servers retry, especially email servers like Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, they seem to not retry at all, and I think that is good. Thanks again for the info, I will see if I can test it out.

If the server responds but with an error code, the message will bounce. But nearly all SMTP servers have a significant retry period for non-response becuase the Internet is neither perfect nor immediate in all cases. -- Ed Crowley MVP "There are seldom good technological solutions to behavioral problems." . "venom66" wrote in message news:210957b5-4ce4-4e88-a797-9c1ef8c706d0... Thank you for the message. It seems necessary because many time I have seen an email server down and when people outside the org try to email it, they will get a bounce back right away stating the "Email server was unreachable". I have been told that email servers will retry to send an email, but from my experience this isn't true. I can see why this would not be, perhaps you are emailing someone for a bid on a project, imagine that you didn't know the recipient email server was down, 2 days pass, your email reaches the recipient who already picked someone for the job. If you got an email rejection notice rather quickly, you would know, and could call in to discuss the bid. So I think it is a myth to assume email servers retry, especially email servers like Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, they seem to not retry at all, and I think that is good. Thanks again for the info, I will see if I can test it out. Ed Crowley MVP "There are seldom good technological solutions to behavioral problems."