moving email
i currently have an email account, lets say joe@x.com, configured as an IMAP account.
i wish to change the hosting company for that email address, but the major issue is there seems to be no way to do that directly, or at all. is there a way to do this? |
If you are not the owner of the x.com domain, you cannot change the hosting company and keep the address
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i own the domain. its simply a matter (i think) of mechanics. which no one seems to offer.
if the mailbox formats were compatible, you could make a tarball on one system and drop it in on the other. but no one seems to support that. |
Maybe I am not understanding the situation correctly, but you should be able to change email service providers fairly easily following whatever instructions the new provider gives you. Sign up for the new service. They will give you the MX settings, SPF settings, etc., to change at your domain name registrar. Once you change those your mail should start flowing into your mailbox at the new email provider. Of course, you first want to migrate your existing emails from email provider 1. An easy way to do that is to first set up a desktop client like Thunderbird and make sure you have synced all your email to your local computer, then when you have your new email service hooked up change the settings on Thunderbird and all of your emails will sync up to your new email Inbox. An even easier way to do this is with a service like POBox.com that takes your email from your domain and then redirects it to anywhere, so when you switch email providers you just repoint POBox to your new provider.
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getting the new email service is easy, as you have said.
the hard part is migrating. i normally use the Mail client on a MacBook Pro. in the scenario you describe, what will happen is that it will see the IMAP server for teh new account, see that it has 5 (say) messages, and then sync the client to those 5 messages. that is, it will delete all the email we so carefully downloaded. and this actually seems correct behaviour. or am i not understanding something? |
Mailstore Home was mentioned here on a couple of occasion as a backup/migration tool. It seems to run on Windows only....
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Most email service providers will be able to provide you specific instructions on how to migrate your emails to the new server and then your local email client on your Mac can sync with the new server via IMAP. Here's one example from Fastmail: https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/migratemail.html
I avoid this issue by utilizing Gmail or Outlook.com as my main Inbox and therefore when I move email providers I don't have to worry about migrating all the old emails. |
thanks for some great information!
alas, none of these solutions will work if i try to maintain my old email address. if i had joe@x.com, then i can't use these to migrate to the same joe@x.com at a new host. even the fastmail stuff seems aimed at migrating joe@x.com to joe@y.com. i guess i could migrate to joe@y.com, then after releasing the original joe@x.com, rebuy x.com and then migrate to it. but that would leave joe@x.com not working for a few days. i still can't believe how hard this. does no one care about changing their email? or do they just get a gmail account and expect that will work forever? |
Quote:
Regards, Pavin. |
You could install Thunderbird and drag the old server emails to Thunderbird's "Local Folders" (I don't know if the Mac client has local folders), then drag them back once you have changed the hosting company. Of course if you have a lot of emails you may run into server limits.
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