Originally posted by nica:
It took 11 hrs from the time that I changed
the IP address on the nameservers for it to
resolve and the domains to be available.
For you, perhaps, but not for everyone on the InterNet. It takes from 24-72 hours to
fully propagate throughout the InterNet. Some DNS servers will see the change before others. Your DNS server saw the change 11 hours after you changed it, but the guy down the block might not have seen the change for another day or two.
Some email was lost in the change don't know if it was a setting on the hosting server or if it just happens because emails can't berouted.
Generally speaking, you shouldn't "lose" any eMail due to a DNS change, although it might get delayed. Most
outgoing mail servers will hold onto eMail for 5 days before returning it to sender as undeliverable (if the DNS can't be resolved). During that time, the server will periodically try resending the message. Normal DNS changes, therefore, shouldn't cause lost eMail.
Now you could lose eMail if it was delivered to your old server, but you failed to go back to it to collect it. It's important to remember that DNS updates occur at different times for different DNS servers over a 24-72 hour period. For example, in your case, your DNS server picked up your new IP address in 11 hours, but someone sending you an eMail may not have picked up the change for say 34 hours. That would leave a 24 hour window in which any eMail they sent to you would have been delivered to your old server. If you used your
domain name to resolve your mail server, you would have stopped checking your old server after the first 11 hours. Since it could take as long as 72 hours for all DNS servers on the InterNet to update, there is a 61 hour window in which mail may have been sent to your old server.
How to get around this problem? Use the
IP address of your old mail server to check mail, rather than your
domain name.
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