Email migration and MX records

[John W. Blue]

Hi Bruce,

It would be better to have an SMTP server return 421 "4.3.0" or 421 "4.7.0" while the migration is under way instead of bouncing the connection.  421 will tell all SMTP servers everywhere to "try again later".  The 421 error is a proven greylisting configuration.

Not knowing what is all involved with the actual migration, another option might be something as simple as putting the prod Barracuda server(s) into "maintenance mode".  If that will prevent the migration from happening perhaps Barracuda can spin up an SMTP server that only answers with 421.  Or, if you all are able, you could roll your own SMTP server to answer 421.

Obviously standard do-not-test-in-prod, don’t wing it and hope for the best .. have a step-by-step playbook disclaimers apply and there is nothing wrong with a lower TTL of 60 seconds or less to facilitate reverting.

John

-----Original Message-----
From: bind-users [mailto:bind-users-bounces at lists.isc.org] On Behalf Of Bruce Johnson via bind-users
Sent: Tuesday, January 3, 2023 3:32 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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