Email migration and MX records

[Richard T.A. Neal]

Hi Bruce,

This is something I'm presently battling with as well. My current previously tested plan is:

1. Create all user accounts (with NEW email addresses) on the new email system
2. Setup a temporary forwarder on an existing *temporary* email server (we use hMail) which forwards all email sent to the *current* address to the *new temporary* address
4. Pre-stage the DNS zone file with the new DNS provider (we use Google Cloud DNS which allows this)
5. Transfer the domain name by *purchasing* a transfer/renewal with Google DNS - this allows us to immediately specify the Google Cloud DNS zone file thus preventing downtime
6. At a later date: migrate the destination domain to the new tenant

This allows you to transfer the domain to a new tenant whilst still forwarding interim emails whilst you jump through the domain validation hoops.

I am, of course, welcome to any recommended improvements to this process.

Otherwise, good luck!

Best,

Richard.

-----Original Message-----
From: bind-users <bind-users-bounces at lists.isc.org> On Behalf Of Bruce Johnson via bind-users
Sent: 03 January 2023 9:32 pm
To: bind-users at lists.isc.org
Subject: Email migration and MX records

We’re making an O365 tenant switchover for our domain (a subdomain of the arizona.edu domain) and moving from our Barracuda cloud email SMTP to the University’s tenant, but email cannot flow until the Arizona.edu O365 tenant can take over our email domain.

In anticipation I set our TTL for MX records quite low before the break (150 seconds) so, but the process may take up to an hour (if everything goes well )

Will setting our mx record to a bogus address cause email to bounce on the sending end and eventually get retried later after the mx record has been properly set to the Universities main smtp MX address?

Or are we approaching this in the wrong way?  Basically our end result is we want to stop accepting email from anywhere until the whole process has been changed and we have established the correct route so email starts flowing correctly.

As it’s been explained to me the main campus tenant cannot start accepting email for our domain  until we’ve transferred the email domain between tenants, so we cannot just change the MX record in our DNS server to the University’s (a Cisco Ironport setup)

-- 
Bruce Johnson
University of Arizona
College of Pharmacy
Information Technology Group

Institutions do not have opinions, merely customs

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