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I have installed and configured Postfix in my VPS. This server listen to mail.example.com. I think that i have configured it well, it has a dedicated IP, I bind postfix to use this dedicated IP, it has reverse DNS ecc ecc.

Now, as i told i have this MX: mail.example.com I would like to configure postfix to use more than one MX server. like:


The questions are:

  1. Can I bind more then one ip address to a specific MX ? Example: -> mail2.example.com -> mail3.example.com -> mail4.example.com

Do I need more then one server?

  1. I would like to know IF I can use postfix (in the same server)
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1 Answer

up vote 2 down vote accepted

An MX is a server which receive mails. There is priorities on MX, defined in your DNS entries. If the most prioritized server is unavailable, the SMTP sender should try to connect to the next. If there is two or more server with the highest priority, the sender takes one randomly.

So, usually, there is two distinct servers : the main with the distribution and a backup which takes mails if the main is down. When the main server comes up, the backup send the mails to the distribution.

Each server could run with postfix. Each server can manage a lot of domains and a lot of users on each domain.

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Thank you for your answer, Can you like me a tutorial to understand how can I create a backup server? and then, if I have two server as you told me, do I must have two servers (two different machines) right? –  Dail Feb 29 '12 at 20:59
Of course you need two distinct servers ! For the configuration, check the "relay_domains" option –  Dom Mar 1 '12 at 15:56
but do I have to keep a copy of the domains/users otherwise the backup server will save all the email sent to the domains (that maybe do not exists), no? –  Dail Mar 1 '12 at 15:58
You are right : the MX server should have the list of the available mail address to reject the incoming mails for unknown users. –  Dom Mar 2 '12 at 7:53
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