DNS/MX record insight

Factual Questions
1

I have a question about if it is possible, using one domain name, to point to two separate e-mail hosting services.

For example, I currently have a domain registered with a DNS registrar for years now, who also hosts our POP3 accounts.

Now that some in our family have upgraded to android phones, they would like to move to Google apps accounts. The additional wrinkle is that those users NEED outlook connectivity, so my only Google Apps solution is the Pro version at 50$ / hit :mad:

Since I don’t want to pay for Google apps accounts for everyone (another 8 users), I’d like to leave everyone on the Registrar’s pop3 account and just move the two over to Google apps who want it. The end result being that the hosted domain’s email would be on one of two servers.

I was hoping I could add an MX record for Google and that delivery would go to both services, but I’m really not clear on how the DNS information works. Any insight would be appreciated.

2

Would it work for you to just set up redirects?

3

You can only have one active smtp for a domain. When you see multiple smtp servers its for redundancy not for what you are envisioning here. You can’t have “some people on this server and others here.” You can do redirects to a new account or a server-side forward.

4

Thanks for the heads up! Unfortunately, I don’t want to force one group or the other to change their e-mail address or I’d simple do the e-mail forward thing.

5

I’m not completely familiar with the google named hosting stuff, so I don’t know if this is possible. Can you use forwarding, so e-mail for googleuser1@example.com and googleuser2@example.com get forwarded from your domain to their accounts on google, and then when they send mail from google the @example.com address is used? If google requires that they’re the mx record for your domain, then that won’t work.

If you can do the forwarding, you should update (or create) an SPF record for your domain saying that google is an authorized sender (meaning that other smtp servers shouldn’t be surprised to see example.com e-mail messages originating from google.com). If you don’t do that the google users might have problems with their messages getting tagged as spam.