Email Migration: Best Practices

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By Barrera Alcova

Are you looking for a way to move your email account from Gmail to Outlook or Yahoo to Gmail? If you are still stuck with your college email address or an email from your local ISP like Cox or BellSouth, switching to Gmail, Yahoo, or Outlook is a good idea because you will get a lot more features, more security, and more support. Also, some colleges and universities eventually close student email addresses after a certain amount of time, so it is recommended to migrate before losing everything.

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You can try to perform the migration yourself, and there are tons of tutorials on the net. But if you’re not familiar with the technical details or don’t have the time, it might be best to use one of the email migration tools. So, if you need to transfer your account information, emails, tasks, calendar entries, address book, and contacts to a new email provider, there is a paid service that can do this for you.

Why use professional tools?

You would think there should be lots of services to help people move their emails between providers, but there really aren’t that many. You’ll have to pay if you want someone else to transfer your email. For a transfer, for example, from Cox to Gmail, you will basically have to pay $15-20. This includes transferring all emails from one account to another. However, if you want to do it yourself, you will have to try third-party apps.

What professionals like most about email transfer services is that they support a lot of mail providers, including colleges and universities, international providers, and those annoying local ISPs like Comcast, Cox, etc. Also, you can quickly check whether the program will work for you by checking if your email provider supports IMAP. The good thing is, even if your email provider isn’t listed in the list of supported providers, it will probably still be able to migrate your email as long as IMAP is supported.

As for the working principles, this article cannot cover all possible transfers, but in general, they are the same for all transfers. The process basically covers three steps:

1. Choosing the source destination;
2. Choosing the file formats;
3. Choosing the final destination.

Finally, you will be able to choose which folders you want to migrate. It will try to match folders for you, but if there are any problems, you can manually change the destination. The main advantage of professional tools is the fact that they will keep the integrity of the original email while performing the transfer. This means it will keep the date and time it was sent, any attachments, read and unread status, etc.

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Who are these tools for?

The issue of email transfer is very common, especially among professionals and small businesses. Email management is an engaging and often thorny topic. The great speed of the new smartphones allows us to use emails with comfort and at a frequency never seen before. This apparent ease of use masks some implications that can become critical. One of these is the lack of space available on the server.

For those who do not yet have a professional mailbox, we would say that it is time to get organized. It is not difficult at all. Transferring the emails and archiving them can be mandatory, laborious, and not error-free. Obviously, if you are not a pro, we recommend finding a tool that can get the job done for you.

Backup your emails

Once the domain transfer is finished, we will end up with a new mailbox, active but completely empty. So, in theory, to have access to your old correspondence, it will be necessary to restore it, possibly using the backup file.

Outlook stores messages in a data file with a particular extension—PST. To migrate smoothly, you can create a backup file from your old account and convert it into PST. This format is also convenient for storing your data in the archive. The data files can then be opened whenever needed.

As you can see, there are enough possibilities to transfer your correspondence from the old to the new mail account. Let us know if your migration was successful or not in the comments.

The views and opinions expressed in this blog post or content are those of the authors or the interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer, or company.