Best practice: How to notify senders to use a new email domain?

dawydiuk

11/9/23, 7:03 PM

We are loosing our old domain in ~8 months and will no longer have control over it, this is out of our control... Our mail server is Dovecot running on Ubuntu 20.04.

As a first step to ensure all senders know to use our new domain, we created a procmail rule to prefix the subject of any emails sent to our old domain, with [OLD DOMAIN] $SUBJECT and have instructed users to update contact information(if from a service/mailing list) or if from a person ask them to update their address book. We're wondering if we should go further and add an auto-responder notifying senders they need to update their address book to ensure future delivery. Or maybe there are other best practices?

Any recommendations would be greatly appreciated!

PS We are looking to migrate to Gmail(https://hackaday.com/2022/09/07/the-era-of-distributed-independent-email-servers-is-over/). If there is a benefit to doing this sooner rather than later given these challenges please let us know. I'm leaning toward not migrating until after we lose the domain...

0 + 2

dovecot

anx

11/10/23, 7:44 PM

Depends on the kind of communication you used the old domain for. If I were to change my domain, only notifying senders that actually do send mail within such comparatively short timespan, I could bet I would still receive mail at the old one 20 years later.

anx

11/10/23, 7:53 PM

I wonder if the "no control" is slightly more negotiable than you expect it is. The new owner may be willing to implement `RFC7293` and keep most of your mailbox names reserved, which will downgrade your "all mail after X will go to the wrong place" to "later senders will often still learn the new address from non-delivery reports".

Elon Musk

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