Painless E-Mail switch.

[Albion]

My company is currently switching ISPs. It would be nice if we could go without losing e-mail but I am sure it's going to happen. We are using foo-bar.com at our old ISP for our Domain Name. I was lucky enough to find foobar.com open so I registered that also.

Right now my old ISP has foo-bar.com in their DNS and my new ISP has foobar.com in theirs. How can I go about turning off my old ISP and switching foo-bar.com to my new ISP without losing any mail to whoever@foo-bar.com? Will I need to just tell customers that the new e-mail addresses are whoever@foobar.com or can I somehow forward whoever@foo-bar.com to whoever@foobar.com while the internic makes it's database changes.

 

[rjs]

You can have your new ISP pull-down or setup the foo-bar.com DNS zone file on their servers first. Then have the domain hosting for foo-bar.com moved to the new ISP. Its done all the time.

I assume that the mail server is actually at your site, not the ISP's.

 

[Albion]

Even if my old ISP still has it the domain name in their DNS? Or does my old ISP have to remove it before my new ISP can add it?

-cm

 

[rjs]

Your old ISP shouldn't remove it until the domain hosting had actually moved according to a WHOIS at the InterNIC. The key is to have both ISPs with the information so that when the change is recorded at the InterNIC, everything is already in place. Then I would check back with the old ISP to make sure they remove the zone file. Can't tell you how many times clients have had e-mail and other problems due to an old, out-dated DNS file at a previous ISP.