how to keep getting emails when email server goes down?
 

Lets say you have email admin @ gfy.com and gfy.com goes down. Is it possible for you to stil get emails sent to that email address? I heard there are some solutions (like when it goes down DNS are switched to alternatives or something like that).

ps: not talking about simply having backup server where the site would be hosted.

spooling. I think is what you ate looking for.

if your email is down then how would you get email LOL

Sounds like this could be the solution :thumbsup
Are there specific providers for that or should I just purchase small shared hosting account and set this secondary email route through that host?

By the way do you use this setup yourself?

If you want to email someone whos email is down and they have no backup mail server then, no. Other than setting it to send later you're fucked.

We run a backup mail server on our system but it's just to insure that mail is still received. If the primary webmail client goes down our users cannot actually see that email until it comes back up (unless they are able to handle configuring a desktop client or another webmail service to connect via POP / IMAP and check their mail).

We ran into this very issue recently after a failed update. Our mail was still working, our users just couldn't see it. I'm working on a backup webmail solution now as a result.

This is spooling. You can setup a spooling server for yourself or you can purchase it as a service from people. First the email goes to the spooling server, then to your email box. If the spooling server cannot connect with your email server, it will hold the emails in such server until it can reconnect with your server. You can setup definition of how often you want it to try to connect etc...

I am not sure if these 2 things are the same.

What you say is that email always goes through spooling server at first and only then it goes to my email server.

What MX record thing does: normally email goes directly (not through some spooling server) to my mail server and only when my mail server is down it goes through back up server.

Correct, it's not exactly the same thing.

A backup mail server is just another mail server with it's own MX record in your DNS. YOur primary mail server has the lowest number, backup a higher one like this:

mydomain.com MX 14400 10 mx.mydomain.com
mydomain.com MX 14400 20 mx2.mydomain.com

You can have as many mail servers as you wish, this is exactly how services like gmail have dozens of mail servers if not more.

If a mail server cannot connect to the first MX record it will try the second, then the third and so on.

If you list your mail servers with the same "number" they will "round robin" load balance with the mail server handling a request being selected at random.
ex:
mydomain.com MX 14400 0 mx.mydomain.com
mydomain.com MX 14400 0 mx2.mydomain.com

You "could" set up more than 1 spooling server to give a fail over solution that also has some client side redundancy.

Still, unless the clients are configured to connect remotely or you use a cluster for webmail even though your mail is on the server if webmail is down and there is no remote pop/imap access the users won't see that email until it comes back up.