Understanding The Idea
Changing email address providers is a lot like moving and changing the location you receive physical mail. You have a mailbox at your current address and you need to have mail sent to a new address. To do so, you need to have access to the new mailbox and tell the postal service the location of the new mailbox.
For a short period time, there may be a bit of an overlap where some mail might get routed to the old mailbox, but eventually once everyone is notified of the new address.
Similarly, if you have a bunch of packages sitting at the old location, you probably don’t want to leave them there and so you have to figure out a way to transfer that mail from one address to another.
Transferring your email service is pretty similar. For a period of time, you have access to both inboxes (the old email server and the new email server), you’ll have to physically transfer anything you don’t want to lose to the new location, and you might have to wait a bit of time for the transition to fully take effect.
Step 1
Connect To Your Old Inbox With A Mail App
The easiest way to make this transition is to leverage the help of an email application, such as Outlook or Thunderbird.
If you haven’t already, refer to the guide on how to connect an email account to an email software.
With this connected, the mail app will begin to download a copy of all of the folders and emails on the mail server.
As you’ll note, on the left hand column, the folder named “folders” has automatically been downloaded from the mail server and a list of emails in the inbox is also shown. Note, sometimes the mail app may not automatically begin syncing folders. If that’s the case, you may need to manually subscribe to the folder. This process differs from mail application, but on Thunderbird, you simply right click on the account and then click “Subscribe”.
To help with organization, I’ve right clicked into the settings of this email address and renamed it to old server.
Step 2
CONNECT TO THE NEW MAIL Inbox
Next, repeat the same process above, but connect to the new server details. If you’re using the same email address, but at a new service provider, generally the only change will be the server and port settings. This process also works if you’d just like to transfer your email address as well, whether you’re using a new service provider or now.
After you’ve repeated that process, you should now have two separate email accounts in your mail app – the old server and the new server.
Step 3
Copy Old Emails to the New Email Server
Transferring emails from the old server is as simple as a few clicks. Just right click on the folder you’d like to be migrated to the new email service provider and choose “Copy To” and it will begin the process of migrating the emails to the new server. I prefer to use “Copy to” instead of “Move to” because it ensures the originals stay there and don’t get lost in the transition accidentally.
Additionally, you can also highlight multiple or click on individual emails and also right click and “Copy to” the new server account. At this point, the emails will begin to sync and this process can take several minutes – potentially hours – depending upon the number and size of emails to be transferred.
