Walking Dolphins Consultancy Inc. works with many hosting companies, but we do try to steer clients to Lunarpages.com.

The question arises if a move is determined appropriate, what will happen to company email between the time you take down the existing host and set up the new one.

For this article we’ll use the real example of a move from 1and1 to LunarPages.

We do not claim that this process will work with other hosts, as LunarPages runs a particularly forgiving environment which we abuse to our client’s benefit in this case. But it should also work with many mainstream providers.

The first step is to get a list of all the email addresses that will need to be moved or created fresh if the client wants some new ones.

Next create the addon domain on LunarPages(LP).

Hold on, you may be thinking, you haven’t removed it from 1and1 yet.

Exactly.

LP’s system allows you to add an Addon domain that is not currently pointed to LP’s own servers. This is the biggest part of what makes the transition relatively painless.

After adding the domain, go to the Mail administration section of the LP Control Panel. Create each of the required email addresses.

If you are also moving web site, install it in the appropriate directory from the creation of the addon domain.

Now go to whatever service you are using for DNS management.

(NOTE: If you are using a hosting company for DNS management then this process will not go so smoothly. It is one of the many reasons we recommend people keep their domain registrations/dns management separate from their hosting company.)

Change the domain dns settings to point to the LP dns servers.

If the client has an inventory of email on the 1and1 servers because they have been using IMAP rather than keeping their email locally, do a note to the necessary staff explaining how to retrieve that email before you change DNS.

Now go to 1and1′s cancel site and opt to cancel the domain “As soon as possible.”

Pop into the 1and1 control panel and delete the existing email accounts.

Now either update the company’s email clients or provide clear instructions on how staff can do so themselves.

The worst case that should happen in this process is for a few unfortunately timed inbound email messages could be bounced during the handoff of the DNS settings. If you have bad experience with latency in seeing your DNS changes propagate, you’ll want to take additional steps to preserve interim communications, such as a broadcast message to regular correspondents.

But DNS propagation is not nearly as slow as it is made out to be. Our accounts on LP were receiving and holding email before we had finished updating the email clients. That’s fast propagation.

This is frequently not the case if you are dealing with a hosting company from which you are taking the client. Officially there is nothing different that should make such changes take longer or incur more problems, but simple experience shows such disruptions are not uncommon. Remarkably when the host is not the manager of the domain/dns, disruptions are much less common.

Still, there were a few bounced messages in this move. The lesson we learned was to not effect the move in the middle of the work day. Had we done the thing at 3:00 a.m. even those few messages would not have been bounced.

The most useful information is: get your domain and email addresses set up on Lunarpages.com before you actually point DNS at the LP servers.