Hi, I would like to move my "digital assets" to linode soon but I'm not quite sure how moving my email assets will work. My domain is through godaddy which [obviously] lets you point the domain to any dns.

Once I've pointed my domain to the linode name servers do I need to set up bind myself? I noticed that the linode web interface has a DNS manager, are all of these settings prepopulated for me, meaning all I would need to do is edit the mx entries to point where I need them?

I guess what I'm asking is, is this correct?:
point domain to linode nameservers
go to DNS manager and create mydomain.com zone
alter MX entries in the newly created zone
not have to touch anything else

Thanks for any help, it's appreciated! If you're curious, I am specifically wanting to forward my MX records to google apps

You are correct. Once you've changed your NS records with GoDaddy and set up the entries in the DNS Manager, DNS will be working and you will not need to set up bind yourself. If you're pointing the MX at your Linode, however, you will still need to configure an MTA and MDA to handle the mail. If you need help with the configuration, the IRC channel is a great place to ask questions.

-James

Actually, not necessarily.

Creating a zone in the Linode DNS manager will *not* automatically copy over your existing settings from GoDaddy. It will add some default entries if you leave the creation settings at the default, but these aren't taken from your existing configuration - instead, they're done based on likely things you'll want.

If your domain is example.com, the prepopulated entries will give you A records for example.com, mail.example.com and www.example.com pointing at your Linode's IP, and an MX record for example.com pointing to mail.example.com. But you won't have any other subdomains defined, so you'll need to add those yourself if you have any more.

Does this help?