After setting up your reseller account, you may need to transfer your email accounts over from your old hosting company. The method will differ depending on whether or not your old host used cPanel. If your old host used cPanel, then using the instructions we have on transferring your website from a cPanel host will include your emails. You do not need to transfer them separately.
This article focuses on moving your email accounts from a host that did not use cPanel. This method has a few more steps and can be considered a ‘manual transfer’.
Before You Start
Before performing the move you will want to first set up your email accounts on your new server. If you need help with that, check out our article on creating an email account in the cPanel. Once the email accounts have been created in the cPanel you can move on to the steps below.
Moving your Emails from one Server to Another
Moving your emails to a reseller account is no different than moving them to a regular hosting plan. However, the method with which you check your emails will determine how to move them. Email clients check the server with either the POP3 or IMAP protocols. If you are not sure which protocol your email client is using, check the settings.
IMAP
If you check your mail using the IMAP protocol, you can use our instructions on using the Thunderbird email client to transfer email from one server to another. This article contains step by step instructions. Although we use the Thunderbird email client in the article, you can use your favorite one (Outlook, Mac Mail) to do the transfer.
POP3
If you used the POP3 protocol for checking email on your old host, then the emails were being downloaded to your local machine. You do not have to actually perform any steps to move emails since they are on your computer. You most likely will need to change the settings for your email client to point to your new account. Be sure to check the section below on not losing emails that after pointing your name servers.
How to Keep from Losing Emails After a Name Server Change
Once you have migrated your website you will need to point to your domain’s name servers. Once propagation is complete, your emails will begin coming in to your new server. Propagation time is usually 4-24 hours long. This is the time that it takes for servers around the web to recognize your new settings. During this time incoming emails can go to either your old or your new server. Below are recommendations to prevent you from missing any emails that try to go to the old server.
- Before pointing your domain to InMotion’s name servers, create an email forwarder on the old host. Create it so that it forwards any emails to a third party email address, such as Yahoo mail, Gmail, HotMail, etc.
- Check the email at your old host using their webmail interface. You will need to use their server name instead of your domain name since the domain will point to InMotion. For example, you would use webmail.server123abc.oldhost.com instead of webmail.example.com.
Modifying your MX Records
Some people do not use their hosting servers for email, but use a third party service instead. If you use a third party service you will not need to move any emails. Instead, you will need to make sure the MX records here at InMotion point to the third party service.
For other articles on managing your Reseller account, please go to our Reseller Product Guide or see the following list:
