If i set my own mail server, and then i lost my Internet conection for w/e reaso

n for a moment, and in that moment somebody sends a mail to me.... what happens
with the mail, ill get it later or the sender will get a message error?
I run a mail server that uses a VPS as a relay, so that everything goes to there
and comes from there, which is so that I can use a non-standard port for SMTP,
which I need to do because my ISP blocks port 25. It also allows me to set my PT
R record which is important for getting through spam filters. It has the additio
nal benefit of allowing me to have small periods of down time, because I have it
configured to hold mail for 24 hours if delivery fails. I don't remember how of
ten it retries, but it's pretty often, like 10 minutes or something. After 24 ho
urs it sends a "delivery failed" message back to the sender. I think that most S
MTP servers do something similar. If you send mail from gmail to a server that d
oesn't exist you get a "delivery failed" message back after half an hour or an h
our or something, and I'm sure that delivery is retried several times during tha
t interval.
So, the short answer is that it depends on the configuration of the SMTP server
that's trying to send you stuff.
I just took postfix down on my VPS for about ten seconds and sent a message to m
yself from gmail during that time. I have yet to receive anything on either end.
..
The only good, secure, reliable way to encrypt email in transit, as far as I kno
w, is PGP. PGP is public key cryptography, also known as asymmetric cryptography
, so-called because instead of using the same key to decrypt data that you used
to encrypt it, you generate a pair of keys, one of which is necessary to decrypt
data that was encrypted with the other. The key that does the encrypting is the
"public key", because it is not a secret. Anyone can use it to encrypt data. On
ce data has been encrypted with it, though, it can only be decrypted with the ma
tching private key, which you keep a secret. If people want to send you email th
ey encrypt it with your public key, and anyone who intercepts it will not be abl
e to read it without your private key. The only serious complication is that peo
ple need a way to be REALLY sure that they're using your public key, and not the
public key of someone who is pretending to be you, because if they use the wron
g one then someone else could potentially read their message and you will not be
able to decrypt it.
You may also want to use symmetric encryption to encrypt the storage where the m
ail is kept, but that's relatively simple. Hope that helps.