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Not every provider needs its own playbook. If you’re moving mailboxes from Rackspace, OpenSRS, GoDaddy, Bluehost, cPanel-based hosting, or pretty much any provider that offers standard IMAP access, the process below covers you. Whether you’re a reseller preparing a client’s domain or migrating your own mailbox, the steps are the same.
Moving from Google Workspace, Zoho Mail, Microsoft 365, or a hosted Exchange plan (including Rackspace Hosted Exchange) instead? Each of those needs a slightly different approach, so they get their own guides: Google Workspace, Zoho Mail, Microsoft 365 (also covers Hosted Exchange). For everything else, including standard Rackspace Email, read on.
What you need before migrating
For standard IMAP-based migrations, we need two things per mailbox:
- The IMAP server address (and port, if it’s non-standard) for your current provider — check their control panel or help documentation if you don’t already have it.
- Working credentials for the account, set up as a temporary password rather than the mailbox’s real one (see below).
Picking a tier
Without a specific product to map against, the quickest way to decide is by what you actually need:
- Just need email? Basic covers webmail, aliases, forwards, distribution lists, and spam filtering.
- Need calendars and contacts synced across devices, or real-time document collaboration? Enhanced adds ActiveSync/CalDAV/CardDAV sync and full groupware.
- Live in Outlook and want native calendar/contact sync with no plugin? OEX is built for that, though it trades off chat, video calls, and document collaboration.
You’re not locked into one tier for the whole domain either — Basic, Enhanced, and OEX mailboxes can be mixed under the same domain.
Set temporary passwords before you start
Reset each mailbox’s password with the current provider ahead of time, and use that as the temporary password for the migration window rather than asking for the real one. Let your customers know what temporary password to use in the meantime, so they’re not locked out of their own mailbox mid-migration.
Watch for password changes mid-migration. If a user changes their password after you’ve set the temporary one, that account’s migration will fail. We retry failed accounts whenever you confirm it’s safe to do so — keeping your migration batches small makes those retries faster, since a lean batch finishes and can be retried sooner than one bundled with hundreds of other mailboxes.
What happens next
Once you have the IMAP server details and temporary passwords ready, you’re set to start the migration itself. The full process, whether you’re moving one mailbox or a hundred, is covered in the migration guide:
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