Some Email Not Being Received After Changing Domains

In the early 1990’s I was one of the first providers of Internet Email. AOL & Prodigy weren’t even doing it yet. It amazes me that nearly 25 years later in 2014 we still have massive email problems. I guess some of them stem from the primitive invention of email.

Not receiving email from certain people after domain change

Sometimes after moving your domain from webserver, you will not receive email from certain people even though, you still receive email from everyone else. This usually results in hair pulling, four letter words, embarrassment, and other thoughts and emotions. So what is the deal?

The most recent issue happened with my own website, www.telapost.com. I had my site hosted at Rackspace. One of my most important clients, a California Personal Injury attorney, could suddenly no longer email me after the move. They wondered if I was ignoring them, or what my problem was. I have also experienced this issue at Hostgator and other private web hosts and email servers. It turns out, that I was using Rackspace, and so were they. When I moved, I quit receiving their email. I could still receive everyone else’s. I had changed my MC record, and everything else was working, but I was not receiving their email at my mail server.

Why?

Lets say we had 2 offices. Your office, and my office. They are right next door to each other. I send a letter to you. The mailman picks up the letter and takes it next door. Why bother taking it all the way down to his truck, taking it to the post office, having it sit there, routed, put back into the postman’s truck for him to re-deliver? He could just take it next door and eliminate all of the junk in between. Well, that isn’t how it should work. This is Internet email we’re talking about, and Internet email is supposed to be sent over the Internet.

Meet the culprit, the local mail exchanger.

I am a little ignorant and get lost in the details here, but if you have just changed web hosts and are not receiving email from a particular person or domain, you not to contact your ex web host and tell them about the issue. They have seen it before and will happily fix it. This may result in changed to the remote mail exchanger or something different.

If you are experiencing this problem after changing hosts please feel free to open a ticket.