Recently we moved our mail servers from where they’ve been hosted for a few years along with our website, to a shiny new cloud server, dedicated just for email (at the moment).

Email is (still) the life-blood of 21st century communication, despite the rise and fall of varying social mediums. Varying reports put the total number of emails sent per year in the 100s of billions, although there is some debate on just how much of that is spam!

So it was important that the transfer went smoothly, with as little disruption as possible. I followed advice from this useful email migration guide to help with the transfer.
To speed up DNS propagation, remember to change your TTL to something small, but don’t forget that your TTL must propagate too!

First, I setup the new server with mail and smtp server software and created all the relevant mailboxes and forwarders. Importantly I set up a PTR record for the server so reverse DNS lookups would match the mail server name properly.
I used the same mail server software we were using on the old setup, so we didn’t have to worry about compatibility issues when moving emails across to the new system.

Secondly I setup a subdomain (e.g. tempmail.edgeoftheweb.co.uk) on the new server and created forwarders for all the accounts from that subdomain to our actual domain: e.g. info@tempmail.edgeoftheweb.co.uk pointed to info@edgeoftheweb.co.uk

Thirdly, once the DNS records for tempmail.edgeoftheweb.co.uk had propagated round the internet, I backed up all existing emails (including the subscribed folders list and email ID list) on the old server, and moved them to the new server. What I didn’t do at this point, but what I should have done, was to create all the existing IMAP folders (using telnet for example).

Fourth, I setup forwarders on all the email accounts on the old system to redirect mail to tempmail.edgeoftheweb.co.uk. The clever thing was that when emails were received at the new server, it knew to redirect tempmail.edgeoftheweb.co.uk to edgeoftheweb.co.uk, but because it thought edgeoftheweb.co.uk was a locally stored domain name it just delivered incoming emails to essentially a different folder on the new server, rather than sending them back to the old one!

Fifth, I changed our DNS records to point our mail server at the new IP address, and also copied across any additional emails that had arrived since I backed the old server up from the old server to the new server.

Finally, once the DNS records had changed I re-configured our email clients to use the new SSL certificates for the new mail server and new account passwords too!

Having followed those steps we didn’t need to create or setup new email account in our mail clients, we didn’t loose any emails, and our mail clients remained synchronised with the mail server!

NB – to test the new mail server worked OK before DNS changes had been made, I added an entry to my hosts file redirecting our mail server domain name to the new server’s IP address.

First lets look at personal domain prefixes.

choose your email address wisely

There are 3 common variants on your name for an email address.

thomas.valaitis@
This is quite a formal arrangement. If you have an unusual surname (like mine!) it can be confusing to relay to people by phone, and to an extent is also prone to misspellings when people have your business card in front of them. It can however suggest that you are part of a larger organisation where you may not be the only thomas@ or tom@ or even thomasv@. I would recommend this arrangement where size and formality are of importance to you (though I am never a fan of talking up your size).

tvalaitis@
/ thomasv@

This implies a touch less formality than the previous example, but is not as

casual (or size indicative) as a simple first name approach. For my own business email address I tend to use a “thomasv@” email address (it’s a nice compromise for somebody with a complicated surname).

thomas@
Clearly this is a more casual email address prefix, which is great if you are proud of your small company size and expect to remain the only Thomas. The biggest advantage to a shorter email prefix is that it’s easy to remember (unless you also have a crazy first name!) and could be considered more personal.

Whichever email prefix you go for, it’s a really good idea to have all the other variations and common misspellings of your name set up as email forwarders to your main account. This ensures you do not miss any important mails. As an example I forward the following to my thomasv@ pop3 account:

tvalaitis@
tomv@
tom@
thomas@
valaitis@
thomas.valaitis@
t.valaitis@
tom.valaitis@
tomvalaitis@

So having identified which personal domain prefix you are going to adopt, you also need to think about domain prefixes for your business at large.

Common examples include
sales@
enquiries@
info@
complaints@
support@

In my businesses, I tend to have an “enquiries@” and an “info@” email address. The “enquiries” I have set up to handle the enquiries that come to us online, and info I use for clients who already have made contact.

I have them both set up as group forwarding emails, which means I pick the members of the respective teams to which these emails arrive.

Example:

I may have enquiries@ directed to the guys in my businesses that are good at selling and building relationships (the people whom I want to handle the sales calls).

I tend to use the email addresses prefixes purely as forwarders, as once a potential customer makes contact, I like them to have a personal email address (i.e. person = face = trust = accountability) to receive from and reply to for all future contact.

The info@ email address is a useful account to have so I may get customers to send in information that I want a number of people (or the whole team) to have access to. We tend not to promote this account on the website or business stationary.

For small businsses I wouldn’t recommend kicking off with too many email addresses as this can be confusing for customers (and you), and you can potentially lose control of what is pointing where (and are they being picked up).

If you would like more information on picking your email address prefixes I can be contacted at:
mrthomasvalaitiswhositsattheblackdeskbythewindowjustinfrontoftheprinter.iwishicouldtakemyownmedicine@edgeoftheweb.co.uk

Photos courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons license from users derrickkwa

So how can spam be stopped in the first place? Well…it can’t, but there are things that can be done when setting up a new website with a new domain. One thing our clients always want is their email address on the site and the first thing we always tell them is what a bad idea it is. As soon as you put your email on yours or anybody else’s website it will get picked up by spam databases and then get hurled with emails about anything from Viagra to fake bank account information. So to help combat this problem, included with all of our sites and something that we highly recommend doing is using a contact form instead of displaying your email address. This gives you the opportunity to ask your potential customers some brief questions and then have them emailed directly to you without ever disclosing your email address.You can even have it mailed to multiple recipients. But best of all it should help cut down the amount of spam you receive in the future.