Can the nameservers point to 2 different providers?

Question

We are in the process of moving our emails over to Office365, they are currently stored in Gmail.

The concern we have is that between the different employees and timezones, if we change the nameservers at once to Microsoft's, then if it takes 48 hours for some employees to update their mailbox, they won't be receiving emails in between when we change the nameservers and when they update their email account.

So, can I add the name servers that Microsoft recommend to the domain, and have my email account active under Microsoft, while someone else's email (same domain) is still working under Gmail?

Answer 1

No.

In order to manage this change you need to get someone with appropriate knowledge, otherwise you are in for a world of hurt.

In brief, you need to prepare for the change by reducing the TTL for mail records. If your domain is competently set up you will also need to modify records like SPF.

Once you have swapped, you then test and again modify the TTL.

Note that this is only a broad overview, exact steps (and possible extra steps like using a proxy or multiple MX records for backups) have been ignored.

Reasons why what you are asking about won't work

• DNS caches responses. Thus even with 1 set of nameservers you will have issues.
• (In general for mail clients), the nameserver selected from the available list at random. Even if you can control this for your staff, you can't control it (other then by programming it correctly and using low TTL values ) for all mail servers.
• DNS works at a per domain level - not a per email address/account level.