Migrate a mailbox via an email client
Introduction
Currently, you have an email address with another provider and now want to use a hosting.fr mailbox. Here we answer the question of how to migrate your existing mailbox and address to hosting.fr.
It describes how to change email providers without an external relocation service. This has the advantage that you do not have to give access to your data to a third party. Thus, you comply with your company’s privacy policy.
For the migration, it is recommended to create two mailboxes in your email client and then copy the emails.
Alternative methods for migrating a mailbox are listed here.
Prerequisites
In this tutorial, we assume that you can already retrieve your emails with an email program such as Thunderbird, Outlook, or Apple Mail on your computer from the old provider.
Procedure
The migration of your email address and mailbox is divided into several steps:
- Find the access credentials to the old mailbox
- Set up a temporary email transfer
- Create a new mailbox at hosting.fr
- Set up your email client for the new mailbox
- Migrate emails and folders by copying in the email client
- Migrate the domain (optional)
How to find the credentials for your old mailbox
To set up a redirection with your previous provider and retrieve emails from your old mailbox, you will need the credentials for that mailbox.
It is recommended to download emails from the previous provider via the IMAP protocol. For this, you will need the following information:
- IMAP server address
- Connection port to the IMAP server
- Username and password for connecting to the IMAP server
Ideally, your previous email account is already configured in your mail client, such as Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird or Apple Mail.
Configure temporary email redirection
So that, immediately after the transfer, all emails arrive directly in the new mailbox, you should configure a redirection of emails still being sent to the old mailbox. If you then transfer your domain to hosting.fr, this redirection will no longer be necessary. The redirection configuration varies by provider, but is generally possible after logging in on their website. We therefore invite you to consult your previous provider or contact them to set up this redirection.
Create a new mailbox at hosting.fr
If you do not yet have a mailbox at hosting.fr, please first create a new one.
Please note the username and password during configuration.
Set up your email client for the new mailbox
Please configure the mailbox in your email client. Please use the IMAP protocol instead of POP3. The IMAP protocol is more modern than the POP3 protocol. The latter only allows retrieving and deleting emails from the mail server. However, the IMAP protocol allows synchronized management of folders and emails both on the mail server and on the client. Since the client and mail server are automatically synchronized, it is thus possible to access the same mailbox from multiple devices. Moreover, the IMAP protocol also allows uploading emails from the computer to the server. You can therefore copy emails from your old mailbox that are already saved on your computer into the new mailbox.
Guides for configuring the new account with different email clients are available:
Please configure the email account at hosting.fr according to the guide corresponding to your email client.
Migrate emails and folders with Thunderbird as an example
The migration of emails and folders is essentially done by copy-pasting or dragging and dropping in your email client. This is illustrated below with Mozilla Thunderbird. Thunderbird is available on all platforms for common operating systems. The free and open-source licensed program can be downloaded from the Mozilla Foundation website.
In our example, we migrate the mailbox lisa@mustermann-domain.de to the mailbox lisa@umgezogen.mustermann-domain.de. Both mailboxes must be configured in Thunderbird as accounts.
The “Inbox” folder cannot be copied directly. Please select all emails in the inbox. Then right-click on the emails and select “Copy” > “Copy to” > your new email account > “Inbox”. Alternatively, you can also select the emails and drag them into the new folder.
Then also copy the folders from your old account to the new account. To do this, select the folders and drag them to the inbox of the new account.
If you have large folders with many emails or if you have a slow internet connection, it is recommended not to copy all folders at once, but to do so in stages.
Domain transfer
The procedure for transferring your domain will be described in a separate article.