0

I am migrating my website abc.com from one webhosting company to another in a shared hosting environment. Both have cpanel. And the second hosting account i am preparing to move is my multi-domain hosting account with 3 domains already in it.

The problem is, i have many email accounts associated with my website abc.com, which are accessed using webmail. So if i move it to the other host, will i lose all those accounts and their emails?

If yes, then how should i synchronise the email accounts so that all the accounts and the contained emails remain intact?

I saw some several sync tools like IMAP Sync, etc. But these require two hosts while synchronizing, and as you see, i have just one domain name to be synchronized over 2 servers.

PS, i do not have any ssh access on either of them, and i have made complete backup of all files using backup wizard in cpanel.

haywire
  • 131
  • 5

1 Answers1

1

The emails are stored in /home/<user>/mail so they are taken with the cPanel move/backup files (which takes everything in /home/<user>). Therefore, no special measure needs to be taken when transferring the existing emails.

Your biggest problem is new ones: while there is a DNS propagation delay, and depending how the old server is setup, it will continue to accept email rather then forward it to your new server (new installations of cPanel do detect these kinds of changes, but it can also be turned off, so depends entirely on the setup). The easiest way to mitigate this is just to check the old inbox for about a week, to see if new emails turn up there.

A better way is to have the old server reject incoming email, by terminating the account. This way, mail senders will retry over time, and you'll eventually get the email (albeit delayed).

Jay
  • 6,544
  • 25
  • 34
  • thanks for the quick reply. So if i just copy the mail directory to the new host, will i be able to see the old mails along with the new ones for every account in webmail after the transfer of host is done? – haywire Dec 05 '12 at 15:54
  • Correct. Note that some mail clients will get lost in terms of "what was the last email I saw" and opt to re-download from the beginning, but this is normal and there is little you can do about it. – Jay Dec 05 '12 at 15:55
  • Okay. I'll try this out and tell you! Thanks again :-) – haywire Dec 05 '12 at 15:59
  • No worries :-) If you find it answers your question, please hit the accept button (hollow green tick on the left of my answer). – Jay Dec 05 '12 at 16:00