Switching hosted Exchange providers

I've been using Mi8 for hosted Exchange since early 2007. It's been fairly reliable, but it costs nearly fifty dollars a month for two users sharing one gigabyte of storage. Additional storage costs thirty dollars a month per gigabyte – a ridiculous amount when a GB on S3 costs 15 cents per month.

So when Comcast offers eight Exchange mailboxes with 2GB each for no additional cost with my 22MBPS Internet service, I'm ready to jump. I haven't found any instructions for doing this on the web, but it's fairly simple. Here's how I did it (I used tadalist to manage this list):

1. Set up new accounts on Comcast servers
2. Sign in to XO, where I manage DNS for sealrock.com, and create a CNAME record as instructed by Comcast, to verify domain ownership (the XO interface wouldn't let me create this record for some reason, so I had to get their support to do it)
3. Notify a few active clients of the switchover in case there were any mail flow issues (there weren't)
4. Set the TTL on sealrock.com's MX records to 5 minutes. This averts the so-called "propagation" delay when the records are changed.
5. Wait for the weekend
6. Add the new MX records for Comcast and delete the old MX records pointing to Mi8. Create the autodiscover, imap, pop, and smtp CNAME record as instructed by Comcast.
7. Wait for mail flow to stop coming to the Mi8 accounts (just a few minutes, thanks to the TTL trick)
8. Send email to myself from a Gmail account, and sign into the Comcast account's webmail interface to check that it has arrived OK.
9. Export all email, contacts, and calendars to a PST file on each of our PCs. This is easily done by selecting the Mailbox folder in Outlook's export wizard
10. Open the PST files in Outlook and check that they are intact
11. Quit Outlook and setup new profiles for the Comcast server, using the Mail applet in Control Panel. The autodiscover CNAME makes this really easy. Do this on very PC and laptop that uses Outlook with Exchange.
12. Sign in to the new profile for each user, and import the PST file created in step 9.
13. Test mail flow to/from each account again.
14. Setup mobile phones to access new accounts.
15. Cancel Mi8 service.

     

There were only three issues:

1. The issue with XO in entering the verification CNAME – it's a 32 digit hexadecimal string, and may have been too long for XO's web interface
2. The Activesync application on our HTC Dash phones let me edit the domain and password, but gave no way to edit the Exchange domain or username. These fields were inaccessible in the interface, so we had to do hard resets on our phones, losing all our settings, speed dial numbers, etc.
3. And now Mi8 is dragging its feet over the cancellation. After I told them to cancel the account, they sent a verification email. I responded to that, and then they sent a cancellation spreadsheet form for me to fill out. Typical behavior for an outmoded company grimly hanging on to an obsolete business model. I would advise anyone to avoid Mi8 or Apptix, its parent company.