Move your email from your old web host to HostBuddy.com using IMAP

You can move your email from your old web hosting provider to HostBuddy.com using two different IMAP accounts in one email client. This can be done with any email client that supports multiple IMAP accounts. Outlook, Apple Mail, Entourage, Thunderbird, Outlook Express, Windows Mail, and Windows Live Mail all support multiple IMAP accounts. You move the email from the old web host before transferring your domain name or changing the name servers to point to HostBuddy.com.

To begin the process you need to add both IMAP accounts to your email client. Setup the IMAP account with the old hosting provider first.  

To setup your HostBuddy.com account you need to find the mail server you are hosted on with HostBuddy.com. We use multiple mail servers and balance domains across these so you will need to figure out what mail server you are on before setting up the HostBuddy.com account. You can contact us, or find out through HostBuddy.com hosting control panel what email server your domain is on. To find out in HostBuddy.com hosting control panel login and navigate to the DNS Manager, find the Cname of mail.yourdomain.com, for example mail5002.HostBuddy.com, it is your mail server name in HostBuddy.com.

When you set up the account within your email client for your HostBuddy.com domain use the server name you see in the address bar. For incoming you will type in mail.yourdomain.com and the same for outgoing.

How to set up my Email Client

In your email client you will see both accounts listed. Each account should be the account name or the email address you are transferring from. In Outlook they are on the left hand side and you can expand them by clicking on the + next to the email address to view the folders and email.

To transfer the emails simply drag the email or folders between each account. We recommend taking this slowly, just transfer a few emails at a time or one folder. This way there you are less likely to have problems transferring the email. The transfer speed is going to depend on your connection to both the servers. We highly recommends that you perform this transfer using at least a DSL or Cable Broadband connection.

Another sure fire way to move the email is to download it to your local computer and then push it to your new account. To do this setup an IMAP account for the old web host in your email client. Drag all of the email from the IMAP account to your local folders. Your local folder in Outlook is called “Personal Folders”.

After you download all the email to your computer you can then delete the account for the old web host in your email client. After deleting the account add the HostBuddy.com account using the instructions above in this article. Then drag the email from your local computer to the HostBuddy.com account you just added.