Migrating Emails

How would a company that is using Host-A for web hosting and e-mail migrate their e-mail to Host-B?

Is that even possible?

Yes it is possible depending on the configuration of the two hosting accounts.

For example both my last hosting provider and my current one both use cPanel and cPanel provides backup and restore options for the entire hosting account including emails. This meant that a complete backup could be run on my old hosting and that backup could then be restored on the new hosting which resulted in both the web sites and the email accounts being migrated from one to the other. Then it was just a matter of changing where the domains pointed and waiting for them to propogate.

As I had multiple domains pointing to the same email accounts I was able to set up domain1 to redirect to domain2 on the old hosting and for domain2 to redirect back to domain1 on the new hosting and then shift one domain across, wait for it to propogate and then move the other domain so as to ensure that no emails got lost while the domains were being changed to point to the new hosting.

So going from cPanel to cPanel is almost guaranteed to migrate?

Or are cPanel versions important?

Not following you.

If I set up for my client a couple of emails like ā€œadmin@furniture-house.comā€, ā€œsupport@furniture-house.comā€, ā€œreturns@furniture-house.comā€ and it was hosted by GoDaddy, and then over 6 months my client got 10,000 emails and we wanted to then go to ACME Hosting, it sounds like the migration would be easy if there was cPanel to cPanel.

But what are you talking about with the ā€œmultiple domainsā€ part? (Sorry, I am much more a web-developer than a server guy!)

Yes, Iā€™m no server guy but it is indeed to move everything across if both accounts use CPanel. I would keep it simple at this point and just follow the CPanel instructions for backing up and restoring accounts.

Ralph,

I think you meant to include ā€œeasyā€ in your ā€œit is indeed (easy?) to move everything across if both accounts use CPanel.ā€, right?

Does that mean you have migrated a website between web hosts?

If so, do tell more!

The last time I moved, the new web host was kind enough to copy everything across for me. They just needed the cPanel login for the old hosting. Since they would have access to everything on the new hosting without needing the password there is no reason to not give it to them (and then change the password after the migration is complete).

As for the multiple domains part - I have both felgall.net and felgall.com domains. Any emails sent to felgall.net redirect to the corresponding .com email account. I let felgall.net propogate to the new hosting first. Then while felgall.com was propogating I changed the old hosting to reverse the direction of the redirect. So any new emails arriving on the old hosting for a felgall.com account redirected to felgall.net which forwarded them to the new hosting where they got redirected back to the .com email account. It saved me having to check both accounts for emails while the domains were still propogating.

felgall,

What e-mail application did you use on the old and new hosts?

(I guess I donā€™t really understand how e-mail works when you have a website. The only e-mail I know/understand is something like Microsoft Exchange and MS Outlook.)

Yes, sorry, I did mean to include ā€œeasyā€ in there. Sorry!

As felgall says, asking your host to do this is the easiest way, and they are often happy to do so!

CPanel has a simple interface for exporting various parts of your site (and also for importing), including your actual site files, your database and your emails. If you do these bits separately (thereā€™s a separate button for each operation), you download the zip files they give you and then upload them to the new hosting account through the same CPanel interface.

An alternative is to zip up the whole site at once. However, you canā€™t use this single zipped file to reestablish everything on the new host via CPanel. The last time I moved hosts, though, I used this method, and then found out how to transfer the zipped site to the new host and reestablish everything there. Itā€™s very simple, but does involve a little bit of command line black magic, which always scares me a little. Hereā€™s an example of the process, anyway:


###On the old server

  • login to accounts cpanel www.oldsite.com/cpanel
  • click on Backups then Generate Backup
  • youā€™'ll get an email when the backup is completed, with a link to the backup file.) Go into CPAnel and move the back up to the /public_html folder
  • change permissions on the backup file to 0644. (By default, after the backup is generated, the permission is set to 0600, which gives a 403 error with wget below)

###On the new server (VPS/Root Server):

  • open your command line interface (e.g. Terminal app on a Mac)
  • login to your server via SSH by issuing this command:
  • Issue the following command: ssh -p $port $user@$IP (where $port is meant to stand for the port number, $user is meant to stand for your username, and $IP is meant to stand for your IP address). E.g. ssh -p 22 root@121.310.39.180
  • then type cd /home
  • next type in the path to the backup file. E.g. wget http://myolddomain.com/backup-1.30.2015_01-15-16_thingamyjig
  • next, log in to WHM & /Backup Restore a Full Backup/cpmove file
  • choose the username of the account to be restored. (That will help the system decide which site to restore, as there may be several in there.)

Hope that helps a little!

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Except that I am asking because I fear that migrating from GoDaddy to another host could be a real headache.

How would I protect my data while doing such a migration?

Is there a way to encrypt things?

Again, it seems like you would want to protect that from peeking eyes and encrypt it?

Now SSH is used to securely access your server remotely, right?

What is WHM?

As I asked Felgall earlier, does it matter what e-mail application Host-A and Host-B use?

(My clientā€™s site is written using MAMP, and would be hosted using LAMP.)

And how are the e-mails stored? Are they a bunch of individual files? Or is it like MS Outlook where you have a large .pst file? Something else?

For someone who claims to know little about servers, you sure seem to know a lot!!

I know people say bad things about their hosting, but I donā€™t have any experience with them.

Really, it only takes a short while to do this operation, so the chances of being hacked in that small window seem extremely small.

Yes.

Ah, sorry. Itā€™s a management tool that often comes with a hosting enviromnent that sits over CPanel. Itā€™s a really handy tool. Another poster was discussing it in the last day or so, and I forgot that it wasnā€™t you who said you had it.

This isnā€™t really my area, but Iā€™m not aware of applications having much to do with mail servers. I guess they have to run on some kind of software, though. Itā€™s quite different from something like Outlook, of course.

MAMP is just a Mac tool for running a local server based on PHP and MySQL etc, so thatā€™s quite standard. Certainly your old and new host need to support PHP etc. and would ideally be running on the same platform (e.g. Linux).

No, Iā€™ve just figured out how to do a very few things that I needed to do, but Iā€™m generally clueless. :stuck_out_tongue:

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What I meant was that each web host uses some application to provide e-mail. In the Microsoft world, that would be Microsoft Exchange. On the web, Iā€™m not sure what E-mail Applications/Servers exist. The only one I can think of is quite appropriately named ā€œMailā€!!

So, what I was asking above was, ā€œWhat if Host-A uses 'Mailā€ for its e-mail application/server, and Host-B uses ā€˜ACME-Mailā€™ for its e-mail application/server?

It would seem that cPanel would have a hard time migrating e-mail from ā€œMailā€ to ā€œACME-Mailā€.

See?

Because this is all hypothetical, Iā€™m not sure what Go Daddy uses for its e-mail app, or what a future host might use for its e-mail app.

But I am just trying to figure out how hard it might typically be to do a migration if that is even possible.

Your earlier answers imply that if Host-A and Host-B both use cPanel - and I would definitely be on Linux - that there is a decent chance that cPanel can do all of the work for me - along with your nifty instructions.

Hope that makes more sense where i am confused and concernedā€¦

It isnā€™t. As far as the server is concerned it is protocols that are used to access the mail and not specific applications. SMTP is used for transferring the mail to or between servers and either POP3 or IMAP is used for transferring emails from the server to a local computer.

My understanding is that emails are stored on the server as individual filesā€¦

Thanks for the explanation, @felgall :smile:

I definitely think youā€™ll be fine if both hosts use CPanel.

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