Why is my email going to the old server IP address?

EQ Admin

EQ Forum Admin
Staff member
Hello,

Have you tried to do an email migration but are having a problem with your email going to the old mail server? The first thing to do is check your MX records. Are they pointing to the correct hostname and IP address? Did you remember to drop the TTL of your MX and related records before making the change? If you did not drop the TTL the typical setting and time it will take for the change to propagate can be from several hours to a day. It is normal for some ISP's and especially spammers to continue sending email to the old IP addresses for a period of time. I like to give myself two weeks if I am retiring an incoming mail server IP address. There are a few ways to deal with this problem and the solutions depend on what kind of mail servers you are running. I run qmail servers and use the program tcp-proxy to port forward incoming port 25 connections to the new IP address. This helps you to avoid several issues ranging from mail being delivered to the old mail server through user unknown errors if you already deleted the domain from the old server. After two weeks I believe it is safe to end the port forwarding from the old IP address to the new IP address. Any smtp connections going to the old IP should be spam. You will want to double check those connections and make sure none of your own mail servers have smtproutes pointing to the old IP address.

-Raymond
 
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