First I would like to extend my thanks to the lunarpages.com technical support team that helped us with a recent email migration. Out of the many migrations I have performed over the last 10 years this has been the smoothest migration of Exchange to Cpanel Email I have every had. The team at lunarpages.com was both responsive, and knowledgeable.

One of the first things a new IT department must review is finances. Most network Administrators know the answers to your questions but it takes an expert to look at all the moving parts and determine what is right for your client on a case-by-case basis. One of the biggest overheads is going to be your internet connectivity, email, and hosting solutions. (If you have onsite servers then your situation will be different than the one described in this article.) When it comes to breaking down where are domains registered, are you paying the correct responsible party? Where are domains hosted, are they hosted in the most efficient and manageable manner? Where is email actually hosted, and is it the best solution for your client ? Today we are going to cover the email portion of this puzzle.

If you have a house of employees that all use MAC computers but they are connecting to an Exchange server and paying a hefty invoice on a quarterly basis this is a good problem to fix first. It takes proper planning, determination, organization and expertise to execute migrating accounts from an Exchange server to Cpanel hosted email without interruption, loss of email and minimum downtime. Your first step would be to determine when the billing is happening, and is this going to be a cost affective solution. In this case our client was billed on a quarterly basis and were not utilizing Exchange features because they didn’t have Microsoft products tied to the exchange servers. We moved the clients to IMAP on the Cpanel server which allows us to still perform backups of email accounts and Webmail access.

Step 1 – Contact Your hosting company and tell them you need to setup “Split domains” for your email. This will allow you to migrate clients on a per mailbox basis without interrupting other users, and without having to pull the switch on the entire company, and you wont have to mess with MX records if they handle all the traffic and DNS requests for MX records. In this case, Lunarpages.com does have this type of setup and their team can expertly help you out. At this point you should verify that your hosting account has enough room to handle storing all the new email. Lunarpages offers unlimited diskspace.

Step 2 – Backup the current email for the client in case something goes wrong. Read Additional Devices Section.

Step 3 – Setup the new account on the server.

Step 4 – Setup the new IMAP account on the client computer. Using outlook, Entourage, Mail or other email programs you can create a secondary email account that is independent of the first. In most cases, migrating email is as simple as selecting all the emails in the first account and drag and dropping them into the new email box. This stores the messages on your computer in a new directory. These will later be copied to the new email server.

Step 5 – Send the email address to the hosting company to add the list of email address to be handled by the cpanel server, this will go in the file they created for split domains. When they verify that this is done. REMOVE THE EXCHANGE ACCOUNT. All new mail will go to the cpanel server.

Step 6 – Send a test message from your administrative account to the new server and verify the cpanel account has received this message by using the clients webmail access. http://www.Domain.com/webmail if you are using cpanel.

Step 7- Remove the exchange account from the clients computer. This may take some time, be patient or you will corrupt local folders for email.

Step 8 – Restart mail program. Now you will see your new email box, hit send and receive and make sure that your settings are correct. You should see existing mail being populated in webmail on the server. These emails are being pushed from your computer to the server using IMAP Synchronization. (Isn’t that neat ? ) This synchronization process can take a long time depending on the number of emails and attachments. All new email is being received at the server level but will not make it to the desktop until the synchronization process is completed. BE PATIENT.

Step 9 – Once synchronization is completed use the host computer to verify settings, verify ports, send test emails and you should be on your way to being done.

Additional Devices

At step 5 you need to remove Exchange access for additional devices, such as phones, additional computers using this email account, IPAD’s and so on.  After step 7 you can add the new settings to the device and verify settings and send test emails. It is important that these devices remain disconnected permanently or OFF, until the synchronization process is completed. Professionally I turn these devices off at step 1. This will help you synchronize backups properly.

Step 10 – Contact the hosting company and tell them you have removed the Excahnge services and that you need your bill adjusted accordingly. How much money did you save ? How hard was this process ? Leave comments. We hope this article and business document helped you save money and keep from pulling your hair out. thanks for stopping by.

Warning

We guarantee nothing, use this article at your own risk. But we have been working on email accounts, cpanel, webmail, and databases since 1997.