Email Continuity Service

The Techgate Managed Exchange Email Continuity Service (ECS) provides customers access to online mailboxes, utilizing their own public domain, in the event of an unplanned outage on corporate email servers. The ECS service is located in diverse secure datacenters across London, hosted on clustered, fully redundant exchange servers, providing access to full Exchange 2003 mailboxes. Customers access their online ECS mailboxes by either Outlook Web Access, or Outlook RPC-HTTP.

How does it work?
On agreement from you, our engineers will permission your domain on our hosted Exchange Platform, and create all required ECS mailboxes. Public Email DNS records (MX Records), which determine what servers actually receive email on the internet for your domain, will be changed to point a secondary route for your email directly to the ECS mailboxes. The online ECS mailboxes are setup to exactly mirror the properties of your corporate email server. During normal operations your email routes directly to your email environment. However, in the event of a failure of your mail platform, email is automatically routed directly to your ECS mailboxes.

Will I be able to send and receive email with my normal email address?
Yes. Your online ECS mailbox mirrors the properties of your normal mailbox. To any outside party is will appear as if you are using your normal mailbox.

Is it secure?
Yes. The Manex ECS service is hosted in secure access-controlled data-centers, protected by dual hardware and software firewalls.

When can I send and receive email?
Your ECS mailboxes will be available within 1 hour of a primary system failure, and will be immediately accessible online via Outlook Web Access. You will be able to send and receive email as soon as your ECS mailbox is available.

What happens to email sent to me while our server is down?
Email will automatically queue on the ECS hosted servers – when the decision is made to activate ECS, these queues will be flushed and all email will be delivered to your ECS mailboxes. No email is lost.

Will I see my contacts, calendar or historical email?
No. The Manex ECS service is a new email only facility – only email from when your local corporate server goes offline will be in your ECS mailbox. As there is no link between your corporate email server and the ECS service, no historical mailbox data will be in your ECS mailbox, including contacts, calendar items, tasks, or historical email. However all your historical mail will be restored as part of you online backup scheme.

What happens when my corporate email server is available again?
Our engineers will export your ECS mailbox, and allow your support staff to merge any email or data collected during your outage with your normal corporate mailbox. You will not lose any data or email stored in your ECS mailbox.

Do I need ECS mailboxes for all my users?
Not necessarily, but we do recommend setting up ECS mailboxes for all users. Any inbound email that does not have an associated ECS mailbox will receive an immediate and automatic non-delivery-report of ‘User does not exist’, when operating in ECS failover mode.