Can I test the flow of mail before going live?

One of the most tense moments of migrating to a new service is 'the switchover'. Will your email still work, can you test it first before making the final switch?

The answer is yes, you can test the flow of email on every email account in your domain if you wanted to. After you activate your account in our system, you define the email addresses for your domain. Once your email addresses are defined, you can send email directly to our servers as a test.

To send a test message through our servers you need to set the outbound SMTP address in your email client to mx1.ik2.com. Then when you send a message to someone in your domain it will go through the MX Guarddog servers and be processed as a normal email.

Things to watch for...

• You can't send messages to a domain that is not hosted by MX Guarddog, our systems will not relay email to external domains.
• Your test message will be subjected to all SPAM tests, just like a real message. You will probably bump into our greylisting filter on your first attempt to send a message. You will receive an error status 421, and asked to try again later. This is the expected result when a new IP address is attempting to deliver mail. If you attempt to send the message again after a 10 minute period the message will be accepted.
• SMTP messages are delivered over TCP port 25, if your ISP is blocking your access to port 25 (very common on home type Internet connections) you will not be able to send email to our email server directly and are probably expected to go directly through your ISP's email server.

Once you have done your testing and email is flowing as you expect, you can make the final switch as per the instructions in the domain centre section of your postmaster account. If you have any questions or problems getting the service up and running, please contact our support department.