Email is inherently flawed.

Email is built on trust. Yes, trust, and many hacked-together solutions, such as SPF and DKIM, are slapped on top of it. That doesn’t mean those systems are bad, though; just that they are “added on” and not a core part of email.

In the early days of email, you connected to the mail server where you wanted to deliver a message, told the server who you were and to whom to deliver the message, and then the contents of your message. That was it – you delivered an email. The astute among you may have already realized the problem and have probably experienced it yourself: spoofing.

Spoofing is when an email’s “from” header is forged to look like it came from someone it did not. We’ve all received emails addressed from us to us that we didn’t send – and that’s an example of spoofing.

Email is built on trust – trust that the sender is who they claim to be. How do you really know, though? How can you be sure that the email from your bank is really from your bank and not someone pretending to be your bank to steal your information?

We offer full-service migrations for our clients, including email migration, so if you’re a client, don’t hesitate to ask us for help! For those who aren’t our clients or wish to perform email migrations themselves, we offer a public IMAPSync installation at https://imapsync.net/.

Using IMAPSync.net

Once you have navigated to our IMAPSync you will see the web form for performing IMAP migrations. To perform a migration, you will need at minimum:

• The login for the source and destination servers (usually the email address).
• The password for the email account on both servers (this may be different for each).
• The IMAP Server name for the source and destination servers.

To test the details without performing a migration, you can check the box “Just verbose, no real sync” towards the middle of the form.

Once you have entered the details of both email accounts for the source and destination mailboxes, all you need to do is click “Sync or resync!” and the process will run. During the migration, you will see details of the run in the log at the bottom of the page.

Using IMAPSync on the command line

If you are an MDDHosting customer, we make the imapsync binary available to you via SSH/Terminal. The process will require the same details as above, but the big differences are that you will be running it from your service with us and that there is no easy-to-fill form to get it started.