Moving nameservers without losing mail

Changing nameservers replaces the authoritative source for your entire zone at once. Anything that is not in the new zone stops existing the moment resolvers pick up the change — and the record that most often gets left behind is the one nobody was thinking about.

Copy the whole zone, not the website

The failure is always the same: A and CNAME are copied because the site is what people check, and MX or a TXT record is not. Mail then fails within the TTL, silently, while the website looks perfect.

• MX, and the A/AAAA records the MX hosts resolve to if they are inside your zone.
• Every TXT record: v=spf1, _dmarc, every <selector>._domainkey, plus domain-verification records for the services that check them.
• SRV, CAA, and any _-prefixed records (_mta-sts, _smtp._tls, _domainconnect).
• DS, if the zone is signed — and note that DNSSEC needs the DS retired before the switch, or validation fails.

The order that keeps mail up

Build the complete zone at the new operator first and verify it there by querying its nameservers directly, before changing anything at the registrar. Lower the TTLs a day ahead if you can, so a mistake is minutes rather than hours.

Only then change the NS records at the registrar. That change lives in the parent zone, so its TTL — often 24 to 48 hours — is what decides how long resolvers keep using the old operator. During that window both must serve a working zone, which is why the old one is kept alive rather than deleted.

Verifying afterwards

Check that the NS set at the parent matches the NS set in the zone: a mismatch is the signature of a half-finished migration and produces intermittent, hard-to-reproduce failures. Then re-run the scan at the bottom of this page against the domain — it reads what the delegation actually serves now, so anything you forgot to copy shows up as a missing record.

Frequently asked questions

How long does the switch take?

The registrar change is quick, but resolvers keep the old NS set for the length of the parent zone's TTL — commonly 24 to 48 hours. Both operators have to serve a correct zone for that whole window.

Does moving nameservers move my mailboxes?

No. Nameservers serve DNS; your mailboxes stay wherever they are. As long as the MX records are copied across unchanged, mail continues to be delivered to the same platform.