Sun Java Communications Suite 5 Deployment Planning Guide

Using MTAs to Protect Your Messaging System

You can use MTAs to protect your Messaging Server deployment, as well as to control the flow of message traffic to and from your site.

An Internet-facing MTA is a single point of contact that receives messages from sites external to your organization. An Internet-facing MTA sends the incoming messages across the firewall to the inbound MTA, typically another Messaging Server.

The inbound MTA then queries the directory to determine where to send the message within the organization. The Internet-facing MTA is located in the demilitarized zone (DMZ) of the firewall (between the external and internal walls of the firewall), and does not have access to any information about servers other than the inbound MTA.

The outbound MTA accepts outgoing messages from clients. It queries LDAP to find out where to send the message, then sends it off to the appropriate server or out across the firewall to the Internet. This offloads the MTA work from messaging servers that are used by users to retrieve messages. Figure 12–5 illustrates the idea.

Figure 12–5 MTAs in Messaging Topology

This diagram shows the mail relays in a Messaging Server
topology.