Splitting MX record

[calemjess]

We have an old website and I've currently been working on a new one hosted through easyaddress.net and it is not visible to the public yet.
We are to the point we are ready to make it live...........

But.......................
One of our ministers wants the church emails to currently remain on their server. So I was going to point the DNS to easy address, and give them the MX exchange and everyone is happy right???

Well, a gentleman who provides the church technical support strongly advises against it. He recommended to do a redirect page, but the problem with this is when a person "joins" the site it by default puts our domain webadress with their login username and because the DNS isn't pointing to easy address, the link won't work. Therefore, making me have to change the link by hand or sending out a second email with the correct link.

And to be quite honest, I can handle the DNS change, but the MX record is a bit above my head.

Are there any other options? As I see it we either change the DNS, have everything both site and email hosted through easyaddress or split the MX record.

aaahhhhh my brain hurts I've thought this through so much and again, this portion is a bit over my head......hence the reason we went with easy address! Help!

[calemjess]

Hope my post above makes some sense. As I re-read it, it is making my head spin! :)

[David Gillaspey]

One of our ministers wants the church emails to currently remain on their server. Hi Kim,

This critical point (and source of the problem) is a bit unclear to me. The way it's worded, it sounds as if one of the ministers in your church either works for the company hosting the old site, or owns the company. Is that accurate?

Also I'm not sure what exactly you mean by "emails to currently remain on their server." Emails sent to me at various accounts (email addresses) associated with Great Church Websites never actually "remain" on the server. When I click the Send/Receive button in Outlook Express on my desktop computer, they are at that point downloaded and deleted from the server. It IS possible to choose a setting in the email program's preferences that results in emails being downloaded and NOT being deleted from the server. There are times when that's what you want.

But I realize there are scenarios for handling email accounts in which mail is viewed and managed through a browser only. In that case, mail would remain on the server unless specifically deleted by a user. That must be what you mean.

Perhaps what is (also) meant by your statement is that the minister just wants future emails to all of the church's email accounts to continue to go to and be handled by the mail server located on and operated by the existing (old) hosting company, as opposed to the mail server operated by the new hosting company. That's kind of ridiculous, unless it's motivated by the situation discussed in the previous paragraph.

So, having said all that, let me point out that old emails on the old server won't go away just because you change hosting companies -- as long as you maintain your old hosting plan. (So is the minister willing to keeping paying for the old hosting plan?) Old emails stay on old server, new emails go to new server at new hosting company.

The way users ACCESS their email will change, however. Probably they now log in at www.domainname.com or .org or whatever to access their email via the web. In the future, after you have changed the DNS record for the domain name, if they log in that way, they'll be logging into the server at the new hosting company. They'll see new email, but not the old email. Not to worry. The old hosting company should be able to provide a "backdoor" URL that will allow users to continue to login to the server at the old hosting company to access the old email (as long as the hosting account is maintained).

When you signed up for hosting at the new hosting company, you most likely received an email from the company with lots of information about the hosting account. Among the information will be the backdoor route to access the server of the new hosting company until the DNS records for the domain name are switched (to point to the new server) and the change has propagated throughout the internet. In the same way that the new hosting company has provided you with a backdoor route -- a backdoor URL -- to access their server temporarily, the old hosting company can or already has (a long time ago, when the account was first set up) provided a backdoor route/URL to their server. That's how users can continue to access their old email.

No change of MX records needed.

Is this of any help?

Sincerely,

David Gillaspey
President
Great Church Websites

[Faithhb_lutheran]

Kim,

let me see if I can help. One of the ministers at your church, who probably uses email a lot, is worried that switching over will interrupt the emails. This type of fear from non tech heads is usually unfounded but common. We had to do the same thing when we changed over from a hand coded site to a CMS. Our pastor and properties person were both afraid that the email wouldn't work, so we kept the hosting with the old company for six months while we say if the new company worked out with the site. What we did was forward the name server for the website ( the A record, i think) to the new server, and you leave everything else the same. I will look back at my notes later tonight, and make a more detailed description later.