Hi All,

I've just taken over a website and have an advanced DNS question regarding MX records which is new to me. I will be transferring the registrar of the domain to my account and servers.

The Scenario:

The client has the domain 'domain.co.uk' They have an internal MS Exchange Server running on their network. The MX record for the domain name is 'mail.domain.co.uk'. The A record for this domain points to the clients network 'nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn'.

My Question:

If I re-create this on my new servers by creating the sub-domain 'mail.domain.co.uk' (pointing the A record to the same IP as before) and then set the MX record of 'domain.co.uk' to 'mail.domain.co.uk', will this work exactly the same as before?

Downtime:

Providing the current registrar doesn't switch the domain off as soon as the domain has been transferred, there shouldn't be any downtime of e-mails since the 'mail.domain.co.uk' will always point to the clients network. Is this correct?

Am I correct on all this and is there anything I am missing? I've never used MS Exchange nor messed about with MX records before so if there's anything I'm forgetting please let me know.

I plan to setup the domains and DNS records on my server at least 24 hours before transferring the domain over to allow for propagation at my current host - although it does typically take only a few minutes.

Any help appreciated on this one and if you need to know please let me know.

Thanks,

Andy

Yes, if you recreate mail.domain.co.uk and point MX record to it it would be same as before.
And about downtime - if you'll have same MX & mail.domain.co.uk records at old & new DNS servers then there shouldn't be any downtime because records will be read either from old or new DNS servers within propagation time.