So I’ve completed the first part of my Google App migration of the draisey.ca domain. The google accounts are active and ready to go and the domain name system database is set up and seems to have fully migrated out into the wild — at least my own mail from the house is bieng directed through google now. I haven’t yet told the main internet server of its demotion on the SMTP front. I’ll have to do this next so I can forward mail from the server through google — if I just change the aliases file to point to the new accounts I will just end up with a routing loop. I’ve thought of several ways of breaking the loop that will work, given the extreme flexibility of exim in routing mail, but I’ve decided that it is hazardous to my well being.

The routing loop is tricky to work around because my main internet server’s hostname is the name of zone. This was an error in my initial set-up as it limits my upgrade possibilities. Now I’m using the zone name for the MX records to route incoming mail offsite to the google machines but still need to retain the ability of the main server to deliver internally and send outgoing mail (and even receive the occasional incoming mail). But local mail on the main machine also is using the zone name which will want to immediately route offsite well before it should, given a sane mailer configuration. As I said before, creating different routing protocols based on the source of the mail as opposed to its address is something I need to avoid. On one hand I can trick the mailer to believe it has a different local name and not worry about how it looks to the outside world, but I fear this will cause any outgoing mail from this machine to be treated as spam and never be delivered. On the other hand, changing the machine’s host name may trigger other complications I would rather avoid.

I don’t know what is best.