Dread Lörd Kaolian wrote:
The really fun part of hosted servers, is depending on how down "down" is, every incoming e-mail any of your clients is trying to send you right now has likely evaporated without a trace. They probably won't even get a delivery failure. Hundreds of clients could have e-mailed you during that outage and all those e-mails will go unanswered for all time...
This shouldn't happen, unless the sending mail server isn't configured to prevent it. The outgoing server from wherever all the source emails are coming from *should* spool the email until it gets a received confirmation from the target server. Of course, some cheap email services don't do this (cause they're cheap or even "free"), so those emails are lost if not caught at the other end. But nobody should be using those services for anything important.
Any reasonable business should make sure to cache both incoming and outgoing email. Actually, for a law firm (like in Thumb's case), it's becoming a near necessity`not just to cache them, but to never delete them (they get archived in a database instead). Court rulings in the last few years have disallowed legal documents sent electronically without sufficient trail to prove when and where they were sent. This means that you *must* use an archiving database with internally coded timestamps in order to ensure the authenticity of your documents.