Migrating your email addresses from one OVHcloud email platform to another

Last updated 21st October 2021

Objective

You want to migrate your email addresses on an Exchange platform to another Exchange or MX Plan platform. In this guide, a two-phase migration process is described:

1. Configure the destination platform.
2. Migrate email accounts from your current platform to the new one.

This guide explains how to migrate email addresses from one Exchange platform to another Exchange platform or MXplan.

Requirements

• a "source" platform with configured Exchange accounts
• a "destination" platform with Exchange or MX Plan accounts (via the MX Plan solution or included in OVHcloud Web Hosting plans). This platform must have unconfigured accounts or be available to host the email accounts that need to be migrated.
• access to the OVHcloud Control Panel

Instructions

Configuring the destination platform

Before you begin your migration, if you have just ordered your new email solution, first add the domain name to your Exchange platform. If you are migrating to an MX Plan platform, where the attached domain name is fixed, you can proceed directly to the next step.

Select the Associated domains tab for your platform, then click on the button Add a domain. Configure your domain name as non-authoritative. Once you have added your domain name, ensure that OK appears in the Status column.

For more details on adding a domain name, follow the Exchange guide.

Migrate email accounts

Your email accounts will be migrated in 3 main steps: Rename the original email account, create the new email account and migrate from the original platform to the new one.

Step 1: Rename

Rename the email account to be migrated with a provisional name (example: to migrate the email account john.smith@mydomain.ovh, rename it to john.smith01@mydomain.ovh).

In the Email accounts tab for your email platform, click on the ... button, then Modify.

Step 2: Create

Re-create your email address on the new account for your Exchange or MX Plan platform. (Using the previous example, you will create john.smith@mydomain.ovh on your new platform.)

In the Email accounts tab for your platform, click on the ... button, to the right of the target email account, then Modify.

Step 3: Migrate

Migrate the source email account to your new platform account using our OMM tool (OVH Mail Migrator).

If you need to migrate several email accounts, we recommend using the Project mode via OMM. You can use this mode to import a CSV table containing the information for the email accounts you want to migrate.

For more information on OMM, please read our guide on Migrating email accounts via the OVH Mail Migrator.

The migration time depends on the amount of data to migrate to your new account. This may vary from a few minutes to several hours.

After the migration, verify that all of your elements are present by logging into webmail at https://www.ovhcloud.com/en/mail/.

Once the migration is complete, you can keep or delete the original account with the temporary name.

If you would like to delete it, go to the Email accounts tab on your original email platform, click on the ... button, then Reset this account.

Check or modify your domain configuration

At this stage, your email addresses should already be migrated and functional. For security reasons, please ensure that your domain is correctly configured in your Control Panel.

To do this, select the Exchange service concerned, then go to the Associated domains tab. In the table shown, you can use the Diagnostic column to check if the DNS configuration is correct: a red box appears if the configuration needs to be modified.

To modify the configuration, click on the red box and carry out the requested operation. It can take between 4 and a maximum of 24 hours for DNS changes to propagate fully.

Use your migrated email addresses

Now, you can start using your migrated email addresses. To do this, OVHcloud offers a web client (web app), available here https://www.ovhcloud.com/en/mail/. You will need to enter your email credentials.

If you have configured one of the migrated accounts on a local email client (e.g. Outlook, Thunderbird), you will need to configure it again. The login details for the OVHcloud server have changed following the migration.
To help you with these modifications, please refer to the respective guide via the Hosted Exchange guide sections. If you are unable to reconfigure the account immediately, you can always use the web application to access your emails.

Go further

Managing contacts for your services

Exchange guides

Join our community of users on https://community.ovh.com/en/

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