I recently moved a domain and as the DNS propagation went through, the web site itself transferred fine, but the mail servers had a hard time figuring out where to send what.

I ended up having to have clients setup outlook to check both the domain (www.company.com) and the old mail server IP address. It was a pain but some mail was still coming through the old IP for another day or two.

I'm getting ready to move another domain and I'm trying to avoid the hassle.

Is there anything I can do to prevent this? Do I need to remove the mail accounts on the old server when propagation is near complete, or at least complete locally? Would that create bounced emails though if the user sending the email was looking at the old mail server?


Thanks in advance!

I figure that happens cos some of the ISPs have yet to have their cache refreshed. As such, they still have the old IP address and would be sending to where they think your mail server is still is. It should all clear up within 48 hours. Anything longer is rare.

One way is to change the mail server name (e.g instead of po.url.com to mail.url.com) and get your clients to continue to check both for a week after the move, and keep both mail servers running for a while. I don't know of any other methods. If there's one, I would be interested too.

get the mx record on the old host to point to the mailserver on your new host.. that way even cached mail sent to the old host should find its way to the new host.

Originally posted by UH-Matt
get the mx record on the old host to point to the mailserver on your new host.. that way even cached mail sent to the old host should find its way to the new host. Actually I didn't think we had access to do that, but your post made me double check and we do!

Perfect! Thank you.