0

I've got my own domain and among other things use it for my email with a third party email provider. I want to change my email providers, which would involve going to my domain manager and changing the relevant settings. Before I do this, I want to figure out the risk of such operation - what happens with emails directed to me while the domain manager is in the process of doing such transfer? Would they simply bounce? Or maybe the transfer is so quick that realistically not much would happen?

1 Answer 1

0

It depends on several factors (and one is, as you surmised, the speed of the transition).

Usually, the old server will keep receiving emails while the new server is being set up. Now, you could turn off the old server, and the standards should ensure that systems attempting to deliver an email would retry after a while. At that point, they would resolve to the new server, and the email would get delivered. No emails end up on the old server this way, some of them just get queued on the senders' side.

But you can't always just disconnect the old server, because it might serve a hefty lot of other domains. So you have to set some kind of failure when the moved domain lands on the old server, and exactly how the senders will react to this is not so clear-cut (it is on paper; not so in practice). Usually, a 451 code is used - but in some cases the sender will keep retrying on the old, already-resolved address, and no amount of 451 will make it stop. The email will then expire after 4 or 5 days. Sometimes, it will not wait a "suitable amount of time". Sometimes, email with low priority might just be dropped at the first 451. In theory none of this should ever happen - but it does.

By keeping the old server up, and accepting the emails for the old domain without errors, you at least ensure that those mails won't get lost. Then, when the new server is up and until emails stop arriving at the old server, they are simply forwarded.

This can be done in a variety of ways. A naive, yet working method is to have a script fetch the emails from the old server and inject them in the new server. Other systems have methods (often proprietary) to move emails "invisibly" between servers of the same brand.

In the end, you need to enquire with whoever your current provider is.

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .