Stepping out of the lurker's doorway for the first time..... On Jun 23, 2005 at 20:27 +0530, Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote: =>Wild idea and there's just too much good german beer here at MAAWG =>(www.maawg.org) in Dusseldorf, but .. anybody tried anycasting a =>mailserver? => =>Operationally that is ... I replied privately to the original poster since I was not on NANOG-post, but this would be interesting if the anycasting was tied into some load balancers doing geographical balancing. That is all I dare say because I am already beyond my realm of comfort. :) (I am a Solaris/Linux sys admin/mail admin/whatever-else-gets-thrown-at-me worker bee. :) =>On 23/06/05, Michael.Dillon@btradianz.com <Michael.Dillon@btradianz.com> wrote: =>> =>> > 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. =>> =>> In other words, SMTP does not have the equivalent of an =>> HTTP redirect which is what he wants here. Maybe SMTP =>> really is broken? ;-) But certain vendors do have MTAs that can kind of do this. I am thinking about Sun's Messaging Server. Chapter 12 of their Deployment Planning Guide <http://docs.sun.com/source/819-0063/ms-topology.html> mentions a "Distributed Topology" that I thinks fits the original posters requirement pretty closely. You can abstract the mail reception (SMTP/MSA) routing behind the MTAs and also abstract the mail retrieval (IMAP/POP/Webmail) behind the Messaging MultiPlexors (MMPs). I would think if further discussion on this vendors product is wanted, then please see a web site <ims.balius.com> that has information on the user mailing list. Stepping back into the lurker's door way as the sun is to bright..... :) -- *********************************************************************** Derek Diget Office of Information Technology Western Michigan University - Kalamazoo Michigan USA - www.wmich.edu/ ***********************************************************************