“Spread them out.”

Say it over and over. You don’t need to know much more than that to prepare your email system for hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, power outages, chemical spills, terrorist attacks or other disasters.

Here’s your own personal Back-Up Two Step:

  1. Add secondary DNS servers, way out of town. Your Domain Name Servers are the directory for your entire Internet presence. If other services can’t find your directory, they simply won’t know where to deliver your mail. If you’re lazy (like us), find secondary DNS services that are willing to act as slaves for your primary domain servers. That way, any changes your DNS servers will be automatically duplicated on the remotes.
  2. Add back-up email servers, way out of town. When your primary mail server is down, the secondaries store the mail. As soon as the primary server is ready to accept mail again, the secondaries forward it (hence, the term store-and-forward). As often as not, anti-spam gateways perform double-duty as secondary mail servers.

Setting up back-up email systems is easy… when you work with knowledgeable professionals who manage state-of-the-art power-conditioned environmentally-controlled systems on fibre optic SONET networks. These folks can help you avoid mistakes like improper routing while making sure your back-up system will do the job properly when duty calls.

Unfortunately, The hardest part of your task will be wading through the fly-by-nights you’ll find when you Google. Any knothead can set up rickety secondary DNS and mail servers on the cheap… And lots of them do.

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