Will a new website break my business email?

This is the question I care about most, because it's the mistake that hurts a small business the most. Your website being down for a day is annoying. Your email quietly bouncing for a week while customers think you're ignoring them is much worse. And it happens, usually when someone connects a new website to an old domain in a hurry.

Here's how it works, in plain terms.

How are my website and my email connected?

Your domain name, like yourbusiness.com, has an address book attached to it. It's called DNS. Each line in that book tells the internet where to send something:

• One line says where your website lives. When someone types your address, this is what sends them to the right server.
• Other lines say where your email lives. These are called MX records. When someone emails you@yourbusiness.com, their email server looks these up to know where to deliver it.
• A few more lines help prove your email is really from you, so it doesn't land in spam.

Your website and your email can live with completely different companies. The address book just has to point to both.

How can a new website break my email?

There are two common ways to connect a new website to a domain:

1. Change just the website line. Simple, and your email lines stay as they are.
2. Move the whole address book to a new company. This is called changing your nameservers. It's often the better setup, but the new company starts with its own copy of the book.

The trouble is with the second one. If the new address book is missing your email lines, other people's email servers can't find where to deliver your mail. Messages bounce, or just never show up. And because the internet remembers DNS answers for a while, mail can keep failing for some time even after the missing lines are put back.

Nothing on your website looks wrong when this happens. The site loads fine. You only find out when a customer calls to ask why you never answered.

How does Website in a Week keep my email working?

We move your domain's address book to Cloudflare, a large DNS company that a lot of the internet runs on. I picked it partly because of how it handles this exact problem.

When you add a domain, Cloudflare scans the existing address book and imports the common records automatically, including the email records. Cloudflare's own documentation also says to always review the records before switching, because the scan can miss less common ones, like some of the records that keep your email out of spam folders.

So that's what we do. We compare the imported list against your current one and add anything missing before we switch anything over. Your email provider doesn't change, and your email keeps arriving where it always has.

What are the signs my email isn't arriving?

• People say they emailed you and you never got it.
• People get "undeliverable" or "address not found" messages back.
• Your inbox is suddenly quiet after a domain or website change.

If any of that happens after someone changes your domain, check the email records first. If you're one of our clients, email us from another address and we'll look right away.