Yesterday, an error at Manitoba Hydro caused a major server and Internet outage across almost the entire downtown Winnipeg.

While an outage of this size causes significant problems our clients, it is a valuable test of business continuity services. One DDS service is our Mail Backup service. MailBackup insures none of our clients ever miss email. Every business that uses email daily should have a Mail Backup system.

There are those that argue that having a secondary MX is pointless - the originating mail server will retry on its own if the final destination can't be reached. But there are mail servers out there that won't queue a message to retry later. If you're down, you're out of luck, and the message is lost forever. Was it important to you? You'll never know, nor will you ever know that it tried to get to you.

For $150/year we provide our clients a backup MX record. The record points to a store and forward mail server in New York City. In the case of mail servers being offline, the Internet having problems, or anything interrupting regular email communications our email backup server will seamlessly handle inbound email and hold it until the regular mail server is available again. There are no limits to the number of email, there is no interface for anyone else to read the email, it simply takes the email and holds it until our client is ready to accept it again.

This service has been tremendously successful over the years and ran perfectly during the outage yesterday. Contact our office and we will tell you during the call if you have a backup MX record in place.