Personal Redundancy Plan discussion

[camner]

Let's start talking about our personal redundancy plans...perhaps enough good ideas can come out to help a few folks.

Here's my system:

A. Overall brief description of services:

1. I own my own domain purchased at Namecheap.com
2. I have a paid fastmail "full" account
3. I have a website hosting account at asmallorange.com (paid)
4. I have a (free) DNS management account at zoneedit.com
5. I have a (free) gmail account

B. Here's how my system is set up:

1. DNS at NameCheap points to 4 nameservers: 2 at my webhost (asmallorange.com) and 2 at Zoneedit

purpose: if my webhost goes down and stops providing DNS service, folks will be seamlessly and silently redirected to the dns servers at Zoneedit

2. In my DNS records, I have two MX records, one pointing to the mail server at asmallorange.com, and a second one pointing to the mail server at Zoneedit

purpose: if the mail server at asmallorange.com is unavailable, any mail sent to me at my domain will be sent by the sender's outgoing mail server to the mail server at zoneedit

3. At both asmallorange.com and at zoneedit.com, I have my emails forwarded to two locations: FM and Gmail

purpose: all of my emails go to two places...I am now reading my emails at Gmail while I await FM's service to go back up

4. I do not "manage" my Gmail account. All of the email just get's dumped into my inbox. After all, it's not my primary system

I don't know if there are better systems, but I don't lose emails this way. Every email has two ways of getting to me, I have two email servers to handle my mail, and I have two DNS providers. I'm sure there's a point of weakness somewhere here, but it seems pretty robust, and once set up, is not complicated to maintain.

[EdGillett]

I now have something similar, but the fly in my ointment currently is that 1&1's domain management doesn't extend to providing MX records as backups to 1&1's MX. That said, with a 99.9% SLA, I'm not as concerned about 1&1's servers going down.

My domain is registered at www.freeparking.co.uk (free to manage DNS for domains bought with them). I've looked at zoneedit.com but wasn't that impressed with the UI, but I've heard it's performance is very good.

Also look into dyndns.org for similar services, but not many not free.

So, domain registered at freeparking, but the name servers records are pointed to 1&1 for web hosting, and subsequently the MX is configured at 1&1.

I now forward mail from 1&1 to Fastmail and Gmail, as well as having it deposited in a 1GB IMAP account with 1&1 itself. I'm pretty much always going to have access to email now.

However - yes, I'm reliant upon 1&1's uptime now. If their MX or DNS went offline, I'm shafted.

However, their SLA is reassuring and they have the resources to back it up.

Your MX and DNS redundancy is very good if you can't guarantee uptime for either service.

Will have another think about mine

[Alicia]

The point of weakness I see in all redundency plans is your own sent mail. How does it get to both places? When you reply in FM, how would that message get to gmail?

[camner]

Originally posted by Alicia
The point of weakness I see in all redundency plans is your own sent mail. How does it get to both places? When you reply in FM, how would that message get to gmail?

OK, good catch. I don't have redundancy for my sent mail. But I'm less worried about losing temporary access to the mail I send than I am to the mail I receive.

I'll have to leave to others how to fix this...I can't immediately think of a way to handle this automatically!

[bplat]

Originally posted by camner
OK, good catch. I don't have redundancy for my sent mail. But I'm less worried about losing temporary access to the mail I send than I am to the mail I receive.

I'll have to leave to others how to fix this...I can't immediately think of a way to handle this automatically!

Automatically bcc to yourself? I know you can setup T-bird that way. It does mean you take double the amount of bandwidth, of course.

[CML209]

Originally posted by Alicia
The point of weakness I see in all redundency plans is your own sent mail. How does it get to both places? When you reply in FM, how would that message get to gmail?

I use my own methods. For the last year I have used FM as a place to move my mail, and, to a lesser extent, use it for less important emails.

Since AOL allowed IMAP from other programs like Outlook, all of my sent mail is in their folder for one month. Outlook keeps a copy in my SENT MAIL folder, which is locally. I only have to move it to FM, and has three copies. However, AOL deletes sent mail after a month, so it is down to duplicate (Local & FM). That has worked well, up until now - when I can't even move mail.

A couple days of this will have me batty, trying to dig out read mail (or keep it new) and deciding which needs to be move vs. which already has been moved.

[uweigl]

Sounds good, but it isn't. If your mail provider withthe highest mx priority fails, there's a good chance that the System nevertheless, accepts incoming mail and put it into a queue (as fastmail does currently for server4). So, the sending Server is out of the game and your incoming mail is sitting in a queue - unreachable for you. Every serious mail provider (even fastmail ;-) ) is using redundant incoming queues hosted at several places, because it's easy to implement.

Udo

[Houman]

I use pobox.com for email redirecting... I can change the destination email at any time, the cool thing about fastmail is you can change the from address, so I can send emails from fastmail using user@pobox.com address type. I really like Pobox ($20 a year) and I use it with my member account @ fastmail.

I also have a domain reseller account with idologic, it is like 1G space, 10G bandwidth, and unlimited reseller, so I can host other domains ($15 a month), which I do for my relatives, and some of whom are paid subscribers to fastmail (forward email there), reasoning is that I think Fastmail web interface is still one of the best interfaces out there. Though gmail is approaching it fast (well they have 100B to work with) but I really don't like that gmail because of privacy.

I used to be a full account but last year changed to member, though I have paid for some of my relatives being fastmail customers, one of them is a full member. Overall I have been pleased with Fastmail. I guess pobox.com is my way out really.

Houman

[camner]

Originally posted by uweigl
Sounds good, but it isn't. If your mail provider withthe highest mx priority fails, there's a good chance that the System nevertheless, accepts incoming mail and put it into a queue (as fastmail does currently for server4). So, the sending Server is out of the game and your incoming mail is sitting in a queue - unreachable for you. Every serious mail provider (even fastmail ;-) ) is using redundant incoming queues hosted at several places, because it's easy to implement.

Udo

OK, right you are. Who can come up with a good workaround?

But, I'm not too worried. I think part of the problem with FM is that to restore things takes a really long time because of the volume involved. At my webhost (where my primary MX is hosted), they've got lots of small machines. If the machine on which my website/MX record is hosted goes down, it would only take a short time to bring up the accounts on another machine, so downtime would be far less than at FM (and, my guess is that they aren't queuing mail when the machine is down, but I'm going to check).

And, since I have control over my DNS and MX records, I can change them manually...though for the DNS records there will be a propagation delay, of course.

[arlomiller]

so, my understading of your system is
domain with two DNS servers
mail gets directed to two mail servers (does this mean it simultaneously goes to both?)
mail from those is forwarded to both fastmail and gmail

i'm just wondering under what circumstances this system will not work, how do you break it?

[nic76]

Originally posted by camner


3. At both asmallorange.com and at zoneedit.com, I have my emails forwarded to two locations: FM and Gmail

purpose: all of my emails go to two places...I am now reading my emails at Gmail while I await FM's service to go back up

How do you make zoneedit forward your mails to two places?
I added a second catch-all address in the mail-forward settings to send it to gmail to (i still want the mails being sent to fastmail). But that didn't do a thing.

[camner]

Originally posted by arlomiller
so, my understading of your system is
domain with two DNS servers
mail gets directed to two mail servers (does this mean it simultaneously goes to both?)
mail from those is forwarded to both fastmail and gmail

i'm just wondering under what circumstances this system will not work, how do you break it?

No, it can't go simultaneously to two mail servers. It only goes to the second mail server if the first mail server is unavailable. That's a point of weakness (if the first mail server is accepting mail but won't deliver it).

How do you make zoneedit forward your mails to two places?
I added a second catch-all address in the mail-forward settings to send it to gmail to (i still want the mails being sent to fastmail). But that didn't do a thing.

Hmmm...have you tested the "second catch-all" approach? I've only done that recently and haven't had an outage yet to test it. If you've tested it, what happens? Does the email only go to the first listed catch-all forwarding address, or to nowhere at all?

[mescanne]

This is a brilliant strategy.

Especially considering it is more reasonable for a lot of these mail forwarders to just not accept mail if they're not forwarding email.

I like having two copies of everything.

Very good!

Mark

[arlomiller]

ok, so it doesn't forward to both, but if i had mail coming to arlomiller.com and presently had that getting forwarded to fastmail via a configuration at godaddy, would it be possible for me to have instantly changed this at godaddy so that it would forward to fastmail instead?

then, does having this forwarding handled at godaddy offer its own achilles heal?

here is my question.

assume no one is reliable. there is no isp, no host, no anything that can actually make good on 99.9% uptime. all of them do to us what FM is. Is it even possible for those of us with some technical savvy (mine much less than a lot of you guys) to come up with a redundancy scheme that is in anyway more robust?

In some ways, distributing all these tasks seems like creating MORE chances for failure, not less? apparently that is incorrect though.

[Gankaku]

camner (my ASO bud!)

Thanks for posting this. *Marking thread to take action on when FM comes back up*