Best way to move IMAP mail accounts between hosts while keeping the same email addres

[nigelbb]

I am trying to rationalise my setup so want to move some of my IMAP mail accounts from my old host A to new host B where I already have some mail accounts set up. What is the best way to accomplish this? I have found all sorts of tools like imapsynch but while they can easily migrate messages between mailstores they don't seem to be able to achieve what I need i.e. take a mail account & matching address e.g. me@nigelbb.com from one host & move it to another.

Tools like imapsynch or services like MigrationWiz let me move all the messages between two different IMAP servers but if my me@nigelbb.com address is live on my old host A I cannot create the same address on my new host B.

I think that I could synchronise my Mac Mail client with Host A. Then offline the mail client then change my MX records to point to Host B then put the mail client back on line but now connected to host B & then the client synchronises & uploads all the messages. However I see this as being fraught with danger e.g. how do I stop the synchronisation going the other way & the empty Host B wipes out all the messages on my client. What happens to any incoming mail messages that are in flight when I flip the MX records presumably they get delivered to Host B but then how do I ensure the 2-way synch between Host B & client?

Any pointers would be much appreciated.

 

[robgendreau]

Seems to me that if you stored them all locally (backup being essential), and then moved your address to B, then you could copy all the messages to B from your client, rather than synchronize. In Mail.app, eg, the mail would be in On My Mac, and the new B account would have just a bunch of empty mailboxes. Synching would be synching nothing.

From B's perspective copying would be just a bunch of messages getting added to it from a client. Move them to like an "Old email" mailbox on B. This would perhaps be safer than trying to preserve an Inbox, Archive, etc structure. You'd then have the old email, local copies of all the old email, and new, empty mailboxes with your B provider. I think just dragging an email from local storage in Mail to an active account mailbox just sends the "new" email there.

I moved a bunch of email to easyMail.ca like this, but I used a new email address. Worked fine, although since it was stuff from gmail I ended up with a considerable number of duplicates. I was moving a LOT mail.

 

[macgrl]

Have you done this yet? and if so how did you do it and how did it work out?

This is something I am looking at doing...moving from google apps to another more simple imap provider.