OK here it goes. I have an email server working perfectly and has been. I want to set up a backup server so that when the primary goes down the secondary will pick up. This itself is not the issue. What I need to know is: It's friday and the main goes down. I have my mail reader closed till monday. All mail goes to backup. main comes back up sunday night. I come in monday check mail and have none on main. it is on the backup server. Is there a way (script) to keep them both without having to use the backup only as a relay and without having to copy the mail to the main server? Otherwise I'll have to write a script that says any mail held here for more than Xhrs relay it? Or something like check main main up relay to main? I know people have this done, but how and who did it? I have read and searched and noone has it that I can find. I did see something on a Korean site, but only read english and not very well at that. Any help or thought would be apprecitaed. Thank you...(need spell checker)

Have a look at RFC 974 for details about Mail Routing and the Domain System Also known as Mail Exchange records, MX records create mail routes. The first field in record data is the priority value; this is the order in which mail hosts will be used by an outside mail server trying to send mail to a domain. Mail hosts will be contacted from the lowest priority value and work up to higher prriority values. If two MX records have the same priority value, they will be used in random order. Mail servers with the same priority value will not forward to each other, nor will they forward to a mail server with a higher priority value. After the priority is the name of the mail host. example.com. MX 10 mail.example.com.

I know.. that is why I was wondering of a script or somethine available to forward the mail after main comes back up. Does procmail have the feature? Can you put a time map into a .forward file? Thank you...

Check out rsync. It's purpose in life is to do exactly what you're wanting... (well, not specifically mail but "mirrors" as it were...._

Anyone used fetchmail?

Carey, as David said, the problem come from your zone's MX entries. Give a lower priority to the backup server will fix the problem. As soon as the main server will be up, email will arrive by themself. Even without backup server, sender's email server will wait until 4 days and automatically retry. Then backup server is not a must most of time.