If email is critical to your business, it is a great idea to have a secondary mail server, which can handle your email, if your main server is offline for any reason. It does not matter if your mail server is in your office, or in a data centre, it can (and probably will) be offline at sometime.
If you have an in-house server which deals with your email (e.g. Microsoft Exchange) then your email service stops working while your server is down, but also when your internet connection drops. Many of our clients have countryside offices, or un-reliable ADSL connections. While down, email cannot be delivered to you from the outside world. While many mail servers will try again later, you have no control over this. This is where a backup MX server comes in handy. This will collect mail, if your mail mail server cannot be contacted.
Backup MX Servers can actually be contacted to collect email, especially in cases where the main mail server may be offline for some time.
This is a kind of backup mail server, which holds email until the main mail server is back online. As this is controlled by us, we can set the way email should be handled. Although it is not possible to collect email from individual mailboxes, the target host can be changed quickly, should a new server or address be needed.
Both solutions have their benefits, talk to us if you think you could benefit from this technology. We reccommend using Dedicated Servers for this job.