Westserve

Avoiding problems when changing web hosts - Email

This is another useful trick to use when changing web servers (hosts) that I want to document:

When you change web servers, you need to change your domain to to point to your new host’s name servers. That in itself is simple: you log in to your domain registrar and change the nameserver setting to that of your new host.
But then there is a frustrating period of time called “propagation”. Propagation is the time it takes from when you make a change to your domain name pointers for all the DNS servers around the world. This time is usually from 4 to 48 hours, depending on how fast the DNS server you/your ISP uses updates.

And it is frustrating. but it is a fact of the way things currently workl Some servers request change information every 12 hours, some not but every few days.

But here’s the rub: During propagation your emails can go to your old host, or they may go to their new host, depending on whether or not the sender’s ISP’s DNS is updated or not. What do you do when you can’t afford to lose emails or even risk delayed replies? For a while, I assumed you just had to put up with the one off inconvenience, but in fact, there is a simple solution:

Step 1. Setup Email Accounts With New Host
Duplicate all your old email accounts on your new hosting account. eg: fred@westserve.org.

Step 2: In Outlook, change your current POP3 setting
In Outlook (or whatever you use for an email client is) edit the properties of your fred@ account. Most likely your POP3 setting is mail.yourdomain.com. Change your POP settings to the IP address of your old hosting account. To find the IP addresses of the mail server, just ping it.

Step 3: Create a New Duplicate Account In Outlook
In Outlook (or whatever) create a new email account – this will basically be a duplicate of your current fred@ account, but using the IP address of the new mail server for the POP3 setting (the new host should be able to supply this). The SMTP server can be left as mail.yourdomain.com.

Step 4: Check Both Accounts for a Few Days
You now have 2 fred@ accounts, one that checks your old hosting account and one that checks your new account. When you click “Send / Receive” both account will automatically be checked. You should only have to do this for a few days after you initiate your domain name change and then can delete the fred@ account that checks the old host.
How does it work? Because you are using the IP addresses of each mail server, the email accounts work independently of the domain name changes. You can actually leave the ‘new’ Outlook account with the IP address, or you can change it to the domain name after the propagation period.

Step 5. Cancel your old web server account
You can now cancel the old hosting account.