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Feature request - Multiple POP3/SMTP servers in account configuration
 
#1
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Hello,

Recently we had some problems with our ISP and we were forced to change routing to our backup link. Router is a Linux box. The same machine is POP3/SMTP server for our branch-office. We were forced to reconfigure The Bat! at our home-office workers to new, backup address of server. My idea is to make possible enter two or more adresses of POP3/SMTP servers (with ";" between, for example). If connection fo first server fails then TB! should try to connect to next server (address) on the list and so on. Credentials (login/password) remains the same for each attempt to each server on list. This feature would made life easier in some cases, like this described earlier.

Regards,

Krzysztof Stelmach
 
 
 
#2
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This should be handled in DNS, using separate MX records for each server and set the priority such that the primary server is priority 10, the secondary is 20 and so on.

You can implement your own DNS server on fairly low-end hardware to manage this, in case you want to manage this internally.
 
 
 
#3
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To solve Krzysztof's specific problem, I agree that reconfiguring his internal network's DNS would be the best solution, but his suggestion still makes sense in several other cases.

I use Yahoo! Mail's POP3 service for some of my e-mail accounts, and they have chronic DNS problems there, probably related to a badly configured load balancing service. Such incidents decreased dramatically since I started using OpenDNS instead of my ISP's DNS server, but they still happen once in a while, probably because of Yahoo!'s own internal misconfiguration problems. When this happens, even Yahoo!'s Web mail returns an error message.

However, when I manually resolve Yahoo!'s standard POP3 gateway address (a simple ping will do, not even an MX query is needed), I can often use one of the returned IP addresses (which may change from one ping to the next) to successfully retrieve my messages. Of course, this is troublesome and involves reconfiguring the e-mail client and then undoing the reconfiguration, for such servers are highly volatile and it's better to rely on the generic mail gateway most of the time. So, I only do it when I know I have some very urgent message to retrieve, otherwise I just wait until things get normal again - it normally doesn't take too long for them to fix it.

If I could compile a list of such servers and put it in The Bat! as alternatives the way Krzysztof suggested, it would be great.
 
 
 
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