DNS change and email concerns

[rcrawford@barr]

The small company I work for recently asked that I setup a small website for them. I have a friend that uses powweb and recommended it so we went ahead and setup an account. One snafu is that, of course, we already have a domain name registered and we are currently using that domain name for email services, but had no website host (I don't think). I'm fairly new with this small company and the person that set up the previous domain hosting/email service did it a while back and is no longer with the company. I am able to change the DNS to point to the powweb servers, but I am concerned with how this will affect the current email delivery etc. I've never done this sort of thing before (as is probably evident) but this is what I was thinking I should do:

1) set up email addresses/users for our domain using the powweb control panel/ops that are the same as the current ones
2) go to network solutions and change the dns info for our domain
3) hope everything goes smoothly and quickly

I was considering adding this blurb to outgoing email messages for our company, but am not really sure its necessary:
"<our company> will be changing its Domain's Name Server information (DNS) which could cause a temporary disruption in E-mail service beginning March 7, 2003 and continuing for up to 72 hours. If you need to <blah blah blah>."

Does this seem appropriate? Am I missing something important? I am concerned about a couple of things:
1) what happens to email that gets delivered to the old domain name location, can it be forwarded somehow?
2) how much of a disruption will there be? If I already have the accounts set up with the same username/password info, will the user notice anything with their outlook mail for instance? (ie: if the old email pop and smtp was ourcompanydomain.mail.com and the new pop and smtp is the same)

And finally, did any of this make sense?

<grins>
Thanks,
Becca

[NMS]

Usually you loose 24 hours of email. Maybe you wish to do it on Saturday evening so that you hope that on Sunday few emails are sent.

Emails that happen to be received in that period will be sent back to the sender with an error. We will probably retry if he knows the email is the right one!

[stevel]

You shouldn't lose any e-mails. Some will go to the old mail host, some will go to the new. As long as you can retrieve mail from both systems, you'll be fine. After a few days, you can cancel the old e-mail service.