[MlMt] good email providers that play well w/ MailMate [was: moving my mail from one server to another—will my IMAP mailboxes & their contents survive the move?]

[John Doherty]

On Fri 2023-04-14 04:58 AM MDT -0600, <ken at kenpope.com> wrote:

> A very naive question: I’m currently using a domain name 
> (ken at kenpope.com) for my MailMate mail.  I want to continue to use 
> that name when I move to Fastmail.  If I open an account at Fastmail 
> with that domain name, won’t it close/end the account at my current 
> dedicated server *before* I can transfer my messages (i.e., I can’t 
> have both my current *and* my Fastmail accounts under the same 
> ken at kenpope.com, can I?)?
>
> But if I open a Fastmail account under a different name (e.g., 
> “Ken at Fastmail.com”), how do I then change my account name at 
> Fastmail to ken at kenpope.com?

You will necessarily have an address @fastmail.com although you don't 
have to tell anybody else about it or send mail from it.

You should use fastmail's help docs and if necessary, ask questions of 
their support staff. They've got you covered, they help people do this 
all the time, and from my limited interaction with them, they're really 
good.

That said, here's a little more info and what I can see as the current 
state of things.

When a sending mail server has a message addresed to 
anything at kenpope.com, it looks up the MX record for the domain. Right 
now, yours is this:

$ host -t MX kenpope.com
kenpope.com mail is handled by 10 kenpope.com.
$ host -t a kenpope.com
kenpope.com has address 72.52.140.33

So when another mail server has a message addressed to 
anything at kenpope.com, it will attempt to deliver it to 72.52.140.33. You 
will need to change this to point to fastmail's incoming servers 
instead.

For example, the MX records for jld3.net are now this:

$ host -t MX jld3.net
jld3.net mail is handled by 20 in2-smtp.messagingengine.com.
jld3.net mail is handled by 10 in1-smtp.messagingengine.com.

And yours will end up looking similar or (probably) identical.

The name servers for your domain are currently:

$ host -t ns kenpope.com
kenpope.com name server ns.liquidweb.com.
kenpope.com name server ns1.liquidweb.com.

So that's where the change will have to be made. There are some other 
decisions to make here that I can't anticipate. For example, 
www.kenpope.com exists and I don't know what you want to do with that or 
when you want to do it.

If you want to leave liquidweb entirely, then you will have to have the 
DNS for the domain hosted elsewhere. Fastmail can do that for you or you 
could choose another DNS provider.

The registrar for kenpope.com is GoDaddy:

$ whois kenpope.com | grep "^Registrar:"
Registrar: GoDaddy.com, LLC

So they control what the name servers for the domain are. If you want to 
change the name servers for kenpope.com from ns.liquidweb.com and 
ns1.liquidweb.com to something else, that's where the change will have 
to be made.

Here's some more info:

Custom domains with Fastmail
<https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/360058753394>

Setting up your domain: NS/MX
<https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/1500000278002>

Adding Fastmail nameservers to GoDaddy
<https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/1500000278042-Adding-Fastmail-nameservers-to-GoDaddy>

I would encourage you to use fastmail's support. They can walk you 
through this, they'll be happy to answer questions, address any concerns 
you have, etc. They do it all the time and they're good at it.

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