Moving SmarterMail to a new server

At any moment, for one reason or another, the question of moving SmarterMail to a new server can come up. The reasons can be different and I am not going to look at them, so as not to pour water. I am not going to describe what SmarterMail is either. If you are reading this article you already know this mail system. In this article I want to describe what has to be done so that the change of address goes smoothly.

First I want to point you to the article about DNS MX records. If you know what it is and how to eat it - go to the DNS control panel and lower the TTL value for the domain or domains served by your server. You will have to wait until the TTL change propagates to all the DNS servers on the internet (the wait = the old TTL). This saves time when switching the DNS addresses to the new ip and keeps the mail loss to a minimum.

Now the step-by-step tutorial:

1. Install SmarterMail on the new server and check that the web face works properly.
2. Stop SmarterMail on both servers.
3. Take the mailConfig.xml and domainList.xml files from C:\Program Files (x86)\SmarterTools\SmarterMail\Service (in some cases C:\Program Files\SmarterTools\SmarterMail\Service). That should be enough. If you want, take all the xml and dat files from that folder.
4. Move the C:\SmarterMail\Domains folder to the new server. It is better to put it into C:\SmarterMail\. If you need to change the path to the domains folder, then you will have to edit the domainList.xml file.
5. Start SmarterMail on the new server.
6. Go to the web face and activate the application.
7. Go back to the DNS control panel and change the ip address from the old one to the new one. At the same time put the previous TTL value back.

What is left is to wait until the DNS changes propagate over the whole internet. You can use whatsmydns.net for that.

original