Moving IMAP servers

Hi Guys,

Basically I'm moving hosting companies soon and I don't want to lose my email. I use IMAP on all my accounts so basically I've got the same setup wherever I chose to read it.

Now, I'd like to shift mail from my existing mail provider to the new one. Ideally, I'd just change the server details in my email program, then when I log onto the new server things would sync up nicely... but I have my doubts.

I've got the email backed up. So maybe it would be easier to "restore" those backups to the new server somehow? Dunno. Both hosting companies use cpanel... but I didn't really see anything in there.

Does anyone have experiense of migrating to a new IMAP server (hosting company to hosting company)?


Cheers

Chris

 

If you are on your own dedicated server, you can move the files from one server to the other, but you are going to run into problems with shifting mail servers like that.

I believe the thing to do is - set up your old server to do store and forward for your domain - that way all new messages arriving at the old server will go to the new one. (lots of e-mail dns caching going on, so your old server will still get e-mails for a while). Set up the new server to mirror your existing setup. Copy files over from one server to the other, and you should be all right.

For hosting, I don't know if they will be that cooperative. You may be able to get them to give you a tarball of your existing imap files, but setting up store and forward is something I've tried to research and have never quite grasped.

 

It's from a shared hosting account to another shared hosting account.

I've decided that it may not be the most elegant or optimal approach, but I think I'll just recreate the mail folder tree on an intermediate IMAP server. Do the switch, and copy the files from the middleman to the destination.

Optimal it may not be... but it'll stop me wasting any more brain time on it


Cheers

Chris

 

Why not ask the new host to move your files from the old host? Easy to do in cpanel: works like a charm. THe backup feature in your control panel should work as well: tar up all of your files; download to your harddrive then reupload/untar on the new host.

When it comes to mail; I've always saved my mail as one big text file to my hard drive then uploaded it to wherever I moved to, after setting up my mailboxes. That works too.