Hello people,

As a relative newbie, ie. this is the first time I have ditched one host (Fasthosts) for another (Splashhost).

I'm concerned about losing emails during the transfer of a domain.

I have set up the new account in its entirety, including all POP3 boxes with the same passwords etc.

I'm all set to change the Nameservers on the domain, but I'm not sure that I'm safe with the emails sent to these accounts during the transfer process.

If my client accesses the new server for their email, and a send is still reading the old NS ip's... will we still get hold of that mail???

Regards

-Alec
Bizweb

two nameservers and a little time?

If so change the IP on ns2. to the new IP address the wait for it to resolve and make sure you can ping it to the new IP then change the IP on ns1 this way you have both sites mirrored and you will not have any down time and should lose no emails.
it will take about a week to do it this way.

Monte

Still a bit confused...

With both hosts being represented in the nameservers, won't mail have a 50% chance of reaching either host?

What host will Outlook visit when resolving mail.mydomain.co.uk, or can it pick up from both servers?

-Alec
Bizweb

Don't cancel the old account, yet.
You have set up the site on the new host, and set up the email accounts.
Change over the nameservers now.

What will happen is that things will start changing over. People will go to the new server, email will be delivered to the new server.

In your email client on your computer (Outlook Express, etc.), set up new 'accounts' using the new server name, server IP, or your new account's IP Address. Any mail that hits the new server will be retrived this way.

Now, the reason you don't want to cancel the old account yet (maybe for a week, if you are deeply concerned, give it a couple of weeks to be really safe), is because you still want everyone to be able to acess everything, even if propagation is slow for them.

So, some people will hit the old server and your site there. Some email might hit the old server as well. What you need to do is access the old server to get your mail.

If you had email accounts set up on your computer (Outlook Express, etc.), and I'm assuming you did, make sure you chage any references to your domain in the POP/SMTP host names to:

Old server name (server.name.com)
Old Server IP Address
Your old IP Address

No matter where your email goes, you'll be able to retrive it. Of course in a week or 2, you'll want to kill off the old account at your old host (stop the billing), and soon access will be cut, so you can delete those old Outlook Express entries, and just keep your new ones.

Hope that helps...

Edit: Just to be sure as I noticed one thing you wrote after I wrote this, you don't want to have Outlook check your mail based on your domain, you want to use either the old/new server's hostname/IP or your old/new site's dedicated IP. This is the key.

Chicken's way is the best.

Monte, I may be wrong , but I think changing 1 nameserver to the second server is not going to help

Another alternative is to set up your account on the second server, but edit your DNS [zone records] in the second server so that the mail.yourdomain.com is still pointing to the old server [or vice versa whichever way you want it - but make sure the zone records are identical in both places]

Then you change the nameservers, and after the DNS propogation has taken place, then change the IP back to the second server [B] after a safe wait of 72 hours

This way, the mail will go to the old server all the time even when the DNS is on the new server.

And the default TTL is something like 14400 seconds or so , which means you will be able to receive mail in the new server with a much less overlap

Cheers
Balaji