Jul 13, 2004 : Greatmail Offers Email Backup Service

📅 July 13, 2004 - Greatmail LLC (greatmail.com), an email hosting provider, announced Tuesday a backup emailservice designed for businesses and organizations seeking complete email redundancy. Backup Mail Server enables administrators to create a secondary mail server that mirrors the setup of their primary server.

The new service delivers messages to mailboxes on the secondary server when a company's primary mail server is unreachable, preventing incoming messages from being bounced, as well as allowing users to send and receive email when the primary server is unavailable.
Backup Mail Server's email redundancy is achieved through DNS management tools available through most domain name registrars that allow administrators to create multiple mail exchange records or "MX records" which define the servers that handle a domain's email. Also, each MX record is given a priority with lower numbered records taking higher priority.
For the service to work, an administrator specifies a lower priority MX record that points to the secondary mail server, while establishing and maintaining secondary mail accounts or a catchall account on the backup server. Finally, the administrator should create secondary mail client accounts that connect to the backup server or instruct users to use Greatmail's webmail to receive and send messages.
Greatmail offers five backup mail plans that include up to 5GB of storage, ranging from $9.95 to $99.95 in cost.