Transferring domains & email accounts to new host

[jhatter]

Hi,

My experience with hosting is creating domains and emails accounts etc (via cPanel), not migrating domains to different hosts etc.

I currently host a website and email accounts for a friend. He now wants to transfer to another host and manage everything himself, which I have no problem with.

Currently he has 6 different email accounts on the domain and these are used on number of different devices/desktops/laptops.

It is my understanding that if the nameservers are simply changed (including incoming, outgoing mail settings) to the new host, he will lose all old emails etc from his email clients that were hosted by me. Is this correct?

It is my understanding that if I do a cPanel backup I will then be able send him all the mail boxes which he can upload to his new host. The problem with this is that I have a number of domains on my server and I don't have the option to just backup and download his domain.

So before I attempt to backup & download several GiGs of files, once I have them on my desktop will I be able to easily differentiate his domain files? Obviously I don't want to send him files relating to another domain.

If you have any other tips or suggestions about transferring his email accounts please feel free to make them.

Thanks

[styxlawyer]

You don't need to download the whole of your server! Go to your cpanel home directory (the one above public_html) and you should see a directory called mail. In there you will find all the emails for every domain and email address you host.

Ask your friend to change all his accounts from IMAP to POP3 temporarily and download all his emails before you transfer servers. He can change them back after the transfer is complete and should lose very little.

Moving servers is never totally pain free, but you will minimise the losses.

[jhatter]

Thanks for your reply.

I navigated to Home > Mail, like you suggested and could see all the individual mail accounts. I did this in File Manager, on the cPanel home page. When I clicked on any mail account the download button in the top tool bar of File Manager was greyed-out, so couldn't download.

I contacted my host support they said I couldn't download the email accounts....
"If you wish to download the emails on your local machine then I will suggest you to configure the email accounts in the email client such as OutLook and then download all the emails on your local machine."

Please does anyone have any suggestions?

[Beverleyh]

"If you wish to download the emails on your local machine then I will suggest you to configure the email accounts in the email client such as OutLook and then download all the emails on your local machine."

Please does anyone have any suggestions?

Yes - take the advice of your web host. If you don't have MS Outlook, try Thunderbird (a free alternative) https://www.mozilla.org/en-GB/thunderbird/ - you can configure it to receive/download all the emails from the existing POP3/IMAP account and you'll be able to retain an archive on your desktop (or burn it to CD for your client) https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/moving-thunderbird-data-to-a-new-computer#w_using-gmail-to-move-messages

Alternatively, setup a free Gmail account and download the POP3/IMAP emails to there - this way you'll/he'll keep an online archive and can continue to send new emails seamlessly via his new custom SMTP server once you set it up in Gmail http://www.cnet.com/uk/how-to/how-to-migrate-to-gmail/
You can configure a custom "from" address within Gmail so your client can send emails from his custom domain but just use the Gmail interface http://email.about.com/od/gmailtips/qt/Send_Mail_from_Any_Account_Custom_From_Address_with_Gmail.htm This probably offers s better solution moving forward (future proofing)