The practicalities of moving your email (NOT Greenby...)

[#1]

@Charleso whilst (in theory) what you've done ought to work, there's a thread I recall here https://community.plus.net/t5/Email/Mail-migration-for-hosted-domain-name/td-p/2024514 where it was discussed and I'm afraid it did not work. No conclusion as to why...

[#2]

@MisterW @Townman  - thank you both for the rapid replies.

The TL:DR is that I'm a long term Plusnet user since the days when they were the choice of techies leaving Demon who couldn't afford the reassuringly expensive fees of A&A. Sadly, with the notable exception of folks like yourselves here, that Plusnet seems long gone so it's time to move on. The recent trend of services moving to non-optional email based "2FA" with an expectation of delivery in a few minutes is the nail in the coffin now that email is an "if it breaks we might fix it next week" SLA

So the long term goal (~2weeks) is to reclaim my domain from Plusnet and move it entirely to MB.

MB is running quite happily on an alternative domain and I've set up a few redirects to it at email address level - this still seems to work,

As Plusnet do not give me full control of my domain DNS while they host it I had hoped to move the email hosting first and then the domain to minimise disruption. I had found this post showing the domain (not blank) in the left field as working from 2021 - the post you linked to @MisterW is a much more concerning read.

It looks like I need to do a full domain transfer then, which means finding someone who knows what that is on the phone (unless any lruking older school Plusnet folks would like to PM me?) - before that I need to update a few critical services to emails on the alternative domain while I can still approve them on my Plusnet hosted one.

Ironically @Townman I've had far greater delivery success sending email with the `from` set as my Plusnet hosted domain via the MB relay than I do normally correctly using the PN relay, despite the lack of correct SPF/DKIM. There are many days when I can't even email the other mailboxes on my own domain as it appears Plusnet do not trust email sent by themselves to themsevles which is just bizzare.

[#3]

UPDATE

I'm not sure if posting here nudged anything (or if you manged to @MisterW @Townman ) but in the length of time it took me to reply to you I noticed a couple of emails arriving in my MB mailbox that I know I do not redirect.

A quick `nslookup` later it seems that the MX records have been published.

So maybe it is being done at the ~6 hour cycle of the old SPF records trick script?

[#4]

I'm not sure if posting here nudged anything (or if you manged to @MisterW @Townman ) but in the length of time it took me to reply to you I noticed a couple of emails arriving in my MB mailbox that I know I do not redirect.

Interesting...

Well it certainly wasnt us, we're just customers like yourself , we have no access to accounts

[#5]

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@paul_blitz wrote:

3) More advanced stuff.

Had I simply switched the forwarding, the switch would have been instant: My email goes into Namesco, then it would be forwarded to M-B instead of Plusnet. However, I also decided to take the bold step of moving the DNS for my personal Domain Names over to M-B: their DNS is actually pretty good, flexible, and easy to configure. The problem is that it can take up to 24 hours for the world to realise there has been a change, so email could go EITHER to Plusnet OR to M-B in that period.... Ooops!

So, I got clever: when I set up my new email accounts at Mythic Beasts, as well as getting it to put the emails into an M-B email mailbox (which is where my email client would collect them from), I *also* told it to forward a copy on to my plusnet email...

So, originally, the email flow was email -->Namesco --> Plusnet, now it's email --> M-B --> copy sent to Plusnet. This means that, until I changed my email client setup, I would STILL get my email sent to Plusnet! Sweet!

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I would have setup a 2nd MX record on the domains DNS and then dropped the old one after 24hours. Incidentally, it doesn't always take 24 hours these days - I've had domains go live within in hour over recent years.

In my yahoo account I have over 20 years worth of emails stashed. They're now limiting mailboxes to 15GB (rotten swines) and I'm at 11.3Gb so still got time to work on this but as Gmail also only offer 15Gb I've had to start downloading stuff to a local database for my own in-house webmail I'm working on (as and when I can). This included writing a multithreaded IMAP client. I cleared out my freecycle folder of over 15k emails and a few others.. still tons to go when I get round to it..

[#6]

Just to follow up on this after the MX records updated I did a domain transfer and everything email is now running on Mythic Beasts - inlcuding complete DMARC/DKIM/SPF

In the end, rather than try and find someone on support who would understand the request and wait ~5 days, I used the external Nominet domain transfer - cost me £10+VAT but was completed in around 5 minutes.

[#7]

Looking through the threads linked to in posts 16 which failed to publish mx records and the thread linked to in post 17 which eventually (possibly on the 6hr script cycle?) published the mx record

In the latter, for left in mx record, fqdn with a trailing dot (as linked post mentions usual @ for left field not accepted) whereas the former thread appears to have used blank mx left field presumably because @ not allowed

Wondering is this was the difference in success vs failure?