Lets start discussing about this subject by closely looking at the term Redundancy.  What is redundancy all about ?

Wikipedia defines redundancy as “In engineering, redundancy is the duplication of critical components or functions of a system with the intention of increasing reliability of the system, usually in the case of a backup or fail-safe.”

Technically this is redundancy too  !

That’s a very nice and to the point definition isn’t? Well, very true.

What’s this hype all about redundancy in database mail ? Lets closely look database mail for more details.

When you create a new database mail profile, you have an option to add multiple SMTP accounts. If an account fails when sending an email, the profile uses the next account in the priority list.

Yes, this is some level of redundancy for database mail.

You can set the priority of accounts by moving them up and down.

Adding a new account is a simple process and can be done easily with the GUI.

The ability to configure multiple SMTP accounts comes really handy when your enterprise infrastructure is having multiple SMTP servers as part of redundancy plan.

Conclusion

Incase you do have an opportunity to add multiple SMTP accounts for database mail, then dont think twice. Its always good to have a backup account which will ensure that you will never miss that important alert/email.

Thanks for reading and keep watching this space for more.