Not sure how to handle setting up new accounts when needing to maintain email contact

[praxis]

So here is the problem... we have a client say

john@johnsdomain.com

and he wants to get set up on our server. so i create him an account for his domain johnsdomain.com

the problem is... i can no longer coorespond with him after setting up his account, until he has switched his dns and email to our server. he can send me email, but when i send back it goes to his box on our server, not the box he is using now.

how do you guys handle this? it is sometimes a few days or weeks between when we set up webspace, and when a complete transfer is actually made.

i could remove the domains from the localhosts file, and then reinsert them later, but this rather tedious to do every time. i'm thinking there has to be a better way? this problem comes up all the time... and then sometimes if i restart a server it puts all the domains back into our localdomains file so i have to go in and manually remove all the ones that shouldn't be there, but sometimes we don't realize it happened and we are just sending email out into a black hole.

thanks.

[praxis]

what i have decided to do is set up the account like this:

johnsdomaintemp.com

and then when he is ready to go, just park johnsdomain.com on top. this just doesn't seem very logical though... any thoughts?

[.:RAIS:.]

Not a solution, but a suggestion.

This is one reason why I request my clients OFF-site email address ( IE. john@johnsISP.com )

IMO, having an onsite email contact can cause issues, and by having an offsite email address you can still contact your clients, even if the server is down. Additionally, I include my offsite email address ( Not for a method of support, but a back-up method ), so they can contact me, even if the server is down.

[Damian]

When emailing new clients why not use your ISP's SMTP server?

[praxis]

thanks for the ideas.