I have done the exact same thing as you have previously as i have a web hosting done on domain.com while my email was pointing to mail.domain.com.
Ques:
"are domain.com and mail.domain.com two seperate "names" that can be pointed to 2 different places or are they one in the same."
Ans:
Assuming your domain.com hosting has not been changed, what you need to do is to inform the dns registrar to change your MX entry of mail.domain.com to reference the new ip address of your new mail server. Depending on service provider, this can take from anything like 3 hours to 7 days, you need to speak to them to find out exactly how much time it takes for dns propagation, this setting can be obtained from your dns registrar and it's out of your control. You will then need to inform the affected email users that dns propagation will take some time. You can also at the same time, inform them in the meantime to point the POP3, SMTP value in the email clients (e.g. outlook, thunderbird) to point to the public static ip address referenced by this domain name for a week (if it takes that long to propagate or as a temporary solution) so that they can still continue receiving/sending email until dns propagation completes.
Ques:
if they can point to different IP's would i then just need to contact the registrat and have them point mail.domain.com to the new IP??
Ans:
Yes, that is correct, just inform them to point only mail.domain.com to the new IP.
Best Regards,
Alvin
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by: SysExpertPosted on 2007-04-17 at 18:56:20ID: 18928817
All you need to do is tell them that you want your MX record to point to your new IP addrss instead of the previous one.
It may take 12-24 hours for this change to fully propagate over the internet.
I hope this helps !