Currently, mail router failover only occurs during transfer to the user's mail server, but delivery does not failover to other cluster mates. In other words, as a mail message makes its way to the recipient's mail server, the router will attempt to route to an alternate server in the same cluster as the recipient's mail server if it finds that the recipient's mail server is not reachable. But once the mail reaches the recipient's mail server (as specified in the Domino directory for that user), any failures that occur during the attempted delivery to the specified mail file are retried locally on the recipient's mail server without trying to route to another cluster member.
This explanation of delivery failover is not consistent with the cluster concept. Customers create clusters to ensure resources are available with user's mail being of the highest priority. With the lack of delivery failover, users are limited in their ability to continue work efforts.
We request the mail router delivery failover function(such as deleting the user's mail file by mistake, or for other errors such as database corruption).
Did you try this parameter --> MailFileEnableDeliveryFailover=1
It should failover even in compact case.
Once you have enabled, you might want to disable the compact abort in case a mail arrives:
MailFileDisableCompactAbort=1
Those parameters only make sense in a cluster and IMHO they should be changed to be enabled by default in a cluster.
[ Daniel Nashed, https://blog.nashcom.de ]