You understood perfectly.  And it sounds like we were on the same page as
far as the outcome.  Perhaps I'll leave it up to the end user whether or not
to designate the @[log in to unmask] address on business cards or correspondence,
since that would eliminate the potential forwarding delays, despite them
being rare.

Thanks for the info!

Jon Galbreath
MCSA/MCSE/Security+
Network/Systems Administrator
International Studies and Programs
Ph: 517-884-2144
[log in to unmask]


-----Original Message-----
From: MSU Network Administrators Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of Brian Martinez
Sent: Friday, May 02, 2008 9:13 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [MSUNAG] Mail Forwarding

Jon Galbreath wrote:
>
> All,
>
> We are moving forward with our move from mail.msu.edu to an in-house 
> Exchange installation. During the most recent Q&A session I suggested 
> that we leave everyone's address as the standard @[log in to unmask] address and 
> just forward it into Exchange to make it easy if you ever leave our 
> unit and also to keep from having to update distribution lists with 
> new email addresses.
>
> One person asked about what happens when mail.msu.edu has another 
> hiccup like the one that happened a couple weeks back where mail 
> clients and the web interface were both offline. Would mail still 
> forward on?
>
> My best recollection was that messages weren't bouncing and were just 
> queuing on the servers but we couldn't access them. If that were the 
> case, would a mail forwarder (not a filter, just a straight forward) 
> still pass mail on even if mail.msu.edu were down?
>
> Thanks for your help!
>
Jon,

If I'm understanding what you are asking correctly the answer is, yes 
mail will still forward on, but only when mail.msu.edu is back up. In 
the situation where everything is down, the original sender's will queue 
up the message on their end as "Host unreachable" and their SMTP 
software will attempt to retry every so often (it all depends on what 
their config is).

If mail is up and running but just being hammered down and "unreachable" 
to our users, chances are pretty great that we will be the ones queuing 
up the emails waiting to forward them on when the queue-runners get to it.

To sum up, email should always (eventually, heh) be coming through. Let 
me know if I misunderstood.

Regards,
./brm