A friend has many domains over at Dreamhost and we are moving the actual websites to Linode. HOWEVER, a lot of his clients have Outlook (etc.) set up to use Dreamhost mail servers and for now he wants to keep all these clients using the Dreamhost mail servers.

How many of these records does he really need?
http://tomakefast.com/images/dreamhost-dns.png
(Screencap of Dreamhost DNS records)

I figure the two MX records are the most important but I'm not sure about the others...I don't know much about email records. Anyway, we are going to try a test but if you have any tips, please let me know--thanks.

mail MX 0 mx1.sub4.homie.mail.dreamhost.com.
mail MX 0 mx2.sub4.homie.mail.dreamhost.com.

Here is the Dreamhost link for setting up email, http://wiki.dreamhost.com/Outlook_Express

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PHP Development @ Tomakefast

The website does not need to relate to the mail server at all.

Assuming you can do this with the dreamhost DNS.. In the domain DNS on dreamhost, you point the www address to the linode IP you are setting up.

leave the MX records alone as they are.

This will tell browsers to go to the linode website for that web domain and MUA's and MTA's to use the MX records to find the mail server for the domain.

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Kevin a.k.a. Dweeber

Eventually he's going to drop Dreamhost entirely so we're going to try just adding the Dreamhost MX and A records to Linode DNS Manager and see what happens.

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PHP Development @ Tomakefast

That works, too. Keep in mind you need to tell your domain registrar to point to Linode's DNS. Here it is step-by-step:

1. Go into the Linode DNS manager. Put in entries that match the ones you have on Dreamhost. Set the TTL to something short, like 5 minutes.

2. Go to your domain registrar's control panel. Change the designated nameservers for your domain to be ns1.linode.com through ns5.linode.com.

3. Wait at least 24 hours for the nameserver change to propagate throughout the DNS. At this point, all your names should resolve to the same addresses as before - it's just going through Linode's nameservers instead of Dreamhost's.

4. When you're ready to switch your web server from Dreamhost to Linode, change the DNS entry (on Linode) for www to point to your Linode's IP. Repeat for any other names/machines you want to move. You can keep the MX records pointing to Dreamhost, as well as anything else you might want to still point there.

5. Once you're satisfied with your changes, raise the TTL in the Linode DNS manager to something a bit longer (one day is usually recommended).

Yes

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