Localized mail servers, global scope

Wed Jun 22 17:26:20 UTC 2005

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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