Migrating mail from elsewhere

Overview

When migrating from a previous hosting provider or even consolidating user accounts, it may be necessary to incorporate email from elsewhere into your account. This can be achieved through a variety of ways, from easiest to most cumbersome.

Migration techniques

SquirrelMail Fetchmail

SquirrelMail, a webmail client available within the control panel via Mail > Webmail, or through http://<server name>/webmail includes support to download mail from a remote server and merge it with your inbox. To get started:

1. Login to SquirrelMail per the correct location; universally, it will be accessible via http://<server name>/webmail
   • Can’t login? Check your credentials.
2. Once logged in, go to Options > POP3 Fetchmail
3. Enter your credentials of your old mail server
   • If migrating from a hosting provider, use your old mail server IP address. Often times this is just the hostname of your old host or old cPanel address.
   • When in doubt, contact your old hosting provider to request the “IMAP/POP3 server IP address”.
   • Optionally, to make this continuous, i.e. letting SquirrelMail act as an aggregate email collector, select “Check mail at login“
4. Click Add Server
   
   

   Sample dialog entry in SquirrelMail

5. Return to the inbox overview, then click on Fetch to begin downloading email
   

   Fetch action present after configuring a server to download from.

    

Direct copy

If coming from another provider that stores email in a Maildir or Maildir++ format, i.e. each message resides in a separate file and email is stored in a folder called “cur/“, then these files may be copied directly over. Messages will be picked up automatically by the mail server and incorporated into your existing mailbox(es). Messages for a user should be copied into Mail/cur/ located within that user’s home directory. For a discussion on mailbox layout, see KB: Email filesystem layout.