Pre-LIVE email tests?

[HardyHarvey]

Howdy y'all.

We're in a tiny town with a couple tiny sites on a tiny server. Had a question before we go live tomorrow, about ensuring things are working in advance..

I can send/receive using outlook express for all the domains and send stuff back and forth. As we are not live yet it isn't sending outside of our little domain. In theory, when I change the IP on our router - (from old winbloze box to new ubuntu/ISPConfig server) - it should start working just fine and dandy to send to hotmail, gmail, and other domains, right?

Any way you can suggest to test this in advance is greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Harvey

[till]

Does your router has a dynamic or static IP? if its a dynamic IP, you will not be able to send email to hotmail and several other email providers as they block emails from dynamic IP addresses. In this case, you need a smart host with a fixed IP to relay emails.

[HardyHarvey]

Yeah we're static IP. Here we go!

One last thing, I'm sure there's 'best practices' for implementing new email servers but anyways i came across a tip I wanted to divulge to the ether..

Copy their unread email from the old server to the new server. I see that there are email files stored in



/var/www/web14/user/web14_(username)/Maildir/new/1208360058.18939_0.(hostname)



I simply created a new file in this folder with similar filename, and pasted the content of an email from the other server, and the user was able to collect the copied email.

Just a tip people might want to see.

Cheers
Harvey