Mail Server Redundancy

[oscarmartins]

Summary

The proposed idea involves setting up a distributed email server infrastructure using the Mailcow platform. The system consists of three servers: a load balancer and database server located in England, and Mailcow instances in Germany and France. The load balancer distributes incoming traffic and also serves as the central MySQL database server. The Mailcow instances in Germany and France handle email operations, such as sending, receiving, filtering, and forwarding. This setup improves availability, performance, and scalability of the email system. Considerations should be given to factors like server capacity, network latency, and security. Configuring the Mailcow instances and load balancer settings are crucial steps in implementing this infrastructure.

Motivation

The motivation behind this idea is to create a highly available and scalable email server infrastructure. By distributing the workload across multiple servers located in different geographical regions, the system can handle a higher volume of email traffic and provide improved performance. The use of a load balancer ensures that incoming requests are evenly distributed among the Mailcow instances, preventing overloading and ensuring efficient utilization of resources. Additionally, a shared database allows for data consistency across the servers. This infrastructure design aims to enhance the reliability, responsiveness, and scalability of the email system, ultimately providing a better user experience.

Additional context

I intend to make redundancy, and I created this scheme. Can someone with more knowledge confirm if it's feasible?

[awsumco]

There are a few things you need to be aware of and challenges.

1. You need to share storage between the servers.
2. Which node will mail come in on as you this will effect how mail is processed for spam

[Gyztor]

Another challenge i see is how would you ensure that server 1 doesn't go down as that would take down everything else. I have heard of Mysql Replication but i don't know much about mysql (or mariadb) fallbacks personally. The nginx fallback would probably be the easy part though of server 1 redundancy.

[Xotetb]

HA is too much complicated for mailservers see: https://community.mailcow.email/d/683-mailcow-clustering