nanog mailing list archives

Re: Localized mail servers, global scope


From: Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu
Date: Wed, 22 Jun 2005 13:26:20 -0400

On Wed, 22 Jun 2005 17:57:52 BST, Tony Finch said:

You don't need a central MX if each site MTA knows which users are at
which sites. Incoming email may have to take an extra hop if it comes in
to the wrong site, but that's a consequence of the specification that no
implementation can fix.

Exactly.  The problem is that Andrew already labeled that as "suboptimal":

                                      Doesn't solve the problem of an email
being sent to the wrong mx server (all mailservers would need to be able to
handle an email delivered to it even if the account isn't local...more
centralization).  This would solve some of the problems with one centralized
server farm if there was a globally distributed network of core mail
servers, but sacrifices autonomy.

He *might* be able to sell the various branch offices on a solution that uses
LDAP or similar (Andre Oppermann suggested qmail-ldap), where each branch
manages its section of the LDAP tree, and the only centralized part the offices
would have to trust HQ to do is possibly run a robust redirector to the various
LDAP servers.

Sorry Andrew - but that's probably the "best suboptimal" that you'll be able to
actually deploy within the context of SMTP....

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