Retrieve emails from Secondary MX record Mail server

[davidlfliang]

We’re running Exchange Server 5.5 as our primary email server. Our ISP holds the DNS records for us. They also provide us a secondary email server. So, if our exchange server is down, their server will catch our emails. This fault tolerance system works fine. However, after running a while, we realised we need to improve it.

The problem is when our pirmary server is down, all emails go to secondary mail server. Then, our users need to go to another log in system (web based mail system, provided by our ISP) to retrieve the their emails. However, users normally don’t know our mail server was down. They still keep trying to check emails from our Exchange server system(we use Outlook 97 client). It will be too confusing to ask our users to keep checking two email systems, just in case our server is down.

So, my question is: how can I set the Exchange server to retrieve emails from the secondary mail server automatically once it is back online?

Our ISP suggests it’s not that hard to set it up on exchange server. Howerver, after some researches, I found we might have to buy some third party products to retrieve emails from secondary server via POP3. Am I on correct track?

Any suggestion?

Thanks in advance
David Liang