Email Setup

[suarve]

Hi,

Can someone please confirm my plan for changing a clients email hosting from one host to another - this is mission critical and the client musn't loose access to their email at all so I'm paranoid

Basically, they want everything to work first thing on Monday morning.

The client has 19 computers, each with a pop3 email account setup in outlook 2003.

This Friday at approx 12pm I'm going to ask the old host to change the nameservers to mine (we are hosting thier website too). I'm due to go down to their business at 3pm to amend the settings in Outlook.

I already added the domain and emails accounts to my hosting, so when the new nameservers resolve everything will be ready.

Just in case the nameservers change over very fast and the clients email stops working sometime after 12pm on Friday I've given the client webamil access as temporary measure - so they still have email access (as at some point on Friday their current outlook settings will cease to work).

Thanks

 

[suarve]

Well I'm trying to transfer everything from the old host to ours, where we have our own smtp server address.

I'm no expert on DNS, but I thought changing the namesevers to our own pointed the domain to the new hosted DNS setting? E.g. so any DNS setting (A records, MX records etc.) the old hosts has are not used.

Many Thanks

 

[suarve]

what ever you are doing you can update their system to get email from 2 pop servers so the change is seamless.

I'm not a dns expert however there will be a lag between the change and people seeing the change, for some it can be a day or two as mail servers can cache records. (I've had it happen a few times)

You might want to take advice from an expert on this, usually the ISP keeps the DNS you jsut point the records to your servers. I think there is a tag (not sure if thats the correct term) on each domain to say which ISP owns (or rather manages it, when you move isp's the tag is released and then picked up by the other ISP), so im not sure you can just close the account with the isp.

Do you mean MX record caching?

My web host just mentioned this - depending on how the current host has their DNS setup, thr MX records could be cached for you up to 24 hours - so its possible that some mail could be delivered to the old email server during this period.