| ACTIVE eMAIL ACCOUNTS | SWITCH-OVER PROCESS We've learned from experience that the best time to launch a site that also has mail transferring from a prior provider is right at COB on a Friday afternoon -- that gives all the routing servers out on the Web the entire weekend to get "caught up" with the change, so mail is flowing smoothly again by the following Monday. Here are some important reminders :: • We will set up your company's eMail accounts on our mail server shortly before the scheduled service cut-over. If any of the folks with existing accounts have an existing mail password they want us to carry over into their new account, please let us know ASAP; otherwise, we'll assign a new PW to each mail account, and will send it to you prior to cut-over time. • Just prior to the Friday afternoon cut-over, everyone in your enterprise should check and download (to their local computers) all their existing mail. Once the cut-over takes place, your old provider may NOT be able to provide you with access to your old mail accounts -- hence the importance of pulling down all mail immediately before the switch. • At COB Friday, BEFORE everyone leaves for the weekend -- they (or your I.T. person) will want to CHANGE the Mail settings on their computers, iPads, smartphones, etc. so their machines will begin looking to the Acuity mail server for new messages. This is a real-time cut-over, so the new settings should be entered as close to COB Friday as possible. We have posted detailed instructions on how to do this on the Acuity eMail support page. Look under the heading "Email Set-up" and find the appropriate help for each computer's operating system. (In order to complete this task, each person [or the company I.T. professional] will need the new mail password settings we mentioned above -- hence it's important that we are aware of any password requests ASAP, so we have time to set up the accounts with those values, before they try to switch over to them). The Web part of the cut-over is simple by comparison. Almost nothing for the client to do, assuming your company's I.T. coordinator has worked thru all the DNS transfer protocols with our customer care team already. The switch will likely not be instantaneous -- the new site, and attendant mail routing, may show up quickly, or not -- and this will vary, depending on who is your internet service provider (e.g., Time-Warner, Comcast, RoadRunner, etc.). Each ISP updates their servers' routing tables on at different intervals -- some more quickly than others. We've seen "live switches" like this go as fast as 30 seconds, but also [in extreme cases!] as slow as 72 hours -- which is why we prefer to do such cut-overs late on a Friday. |