Switching hosts shouldn’t mean losing years of email. With a bit of planning you can move everything across cleanly, and in most cases nobody even notices a gap. Here’s the approach we use when onboarding clients.
Step 1: Create the mailboxes on the new server first
Before touching DNS, log in to your new Hostnasi cPanel and recreate each email account under Email Accounts, matching the addresses exactly. Give them enough quota to hold the incoming mail. Don’t change your domain’s MX records yet — that comes later.
Step 2: Copy the mail across with IMAP
The safest way to move messages is to set up both the old and new accounts as IMAP in a desktop client like Thunderbird. With both visible in the folder list, drag messages (or whole folders) from the old account to the new one. Because IMAP syncs to the server, everything you drag uploads to the new mailbox. For large mailboxes this can take a while, so start well before you switch DNS.
Step 3: Lower your DNS TTL ahead of time
A day or two before the switch, drop the TTL on your MX records to 300 seconds. That way, when you do change them, mail servers pick up the new destination quickly instead of caching the old one for hours.
Step 4: Point MX records to Hostnasi
Once the mail is copied, update your domain’s MX records to point to the new server (your welcome email lists the exact values). New mail now starts landing in the Hostnasi mailboxes. Keep the old account open for a couple of days to catch any stragglers that were still en route.
Step 5: Verify authentication
After the move, set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC on the new server so your outgoing mail authenticates properly. Send a test to a Gmail address and check that all three pass under Show original.
Minimising downtime
The overlap period is your safety net: because both servers are live during the transition, no mail is lost even if DNS takes a few hours to propagate. If you’d prefer we handle the whole migration for you, mailbox moves are a routine part of onboarding — send us the details and we’ll take it from there.
