How to Transfer Email Hosting To Another

Moving the old emails from the previous hosting account to a new hosting account with another provider is not as complex as one may think it is. It does not really matter whether the destination and source servers have a common platform or not. You will need to use IMAP protocol for the shifting of emails. When you connect the mailbox using a web-mail interface you are connected to the mail server through this IMAP. You can even replace the web-mail interface which is browser-based with local email clients like Outlook. So, you may use a local client which can support the IMAP to link to the mail server and access all the mail folders in your inbox and then send or receive emails just like you would with web mails. However, when the Outlook is connecting via IMAP, it is possible to see folder or mails only for as long as you stay connected. To permanently bring such emails into local computers, you must select these, drag and drop then into mail folders which you have to create first in the local email client. This will ensure that all emails are removed from there to your local disk. When you have multiple email accounts containing volumes of emails, you may need some time.

After this is taken care of, you must create your email account on the new hosting server. For this, you must first buy a new hosting account from a different provider. You need to ensure that the new hosting service supports IMAP protocols. You will then have to alter the domain name and change domain name servers. This can be done by asking the new provider for domain names and then you can replace the previous ones with these new ones. During DNS transition, some mails continue to be received by the old server while some arrive at the new destination server. You need to then create two accounts for IMAP and when this is done, the mails folders show in the Outlook. So, you can conveniently drag and drop these.

You must choose a folder in the source box and all mails here are displayed on the right pane of the Outlook. You should drag and drop the emails in groups to the corresponding new folder in the new server. When you try to shift a lot of emails at the same time, you may crash the server. So, after each operation, you must wait for a while for the emails to get downloaded from old server to local disk to be finally pushed into the new one.

The source email accounts should ideally be kept intact for at least 4 days because DNS propagation is time consuming. After this period, you need to perform the same steps again to be sure all emails have been moved.