Migrating email made easy – IMAPSync

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.

Once you are logged into SSH/Terminal, you can begin a sync with the following command, replacing the example details with the actual details of the source and destination mailboxes:

imapsync --host1 source.imap.server --user1 source_email@example.com --password1 source_password --ssl1 --host2 destination.imap.server --user2 destination_email@example.com --password2 destination_password --ssl2

You can choose to synchronize specific folders only:

imapsync --host1 source.imap.server --user1 source_email@example.com --password1 source_password --ssl1 --host2 destination.imap.server --user2 destination_email@example.com --password2 destination_password --ssl2 --folder INBOX --folder Sent

You can also exclude specific folders:

imapsync --host1 source.imap.server --user1 source_email@example.com --password1 source_password --ssl1 --host2 destination.imap.server --user2 destination_email@example.com --password2 destination_password --ssl2 --exclude "Trash|Spam"

Once you’ve configured your command, run it and monitor the process. IMAPSYNC will display the progress and any errors encountered. Depending on your mailbox size, this process may take some time.

Migrating email the “old fashioned” way.

You can always add the source and destination email accounts to your mail client, such as Mac Mail, Thunderbird, Outlook, Windows Mail, etc, and simply drag-and-drop any messages or folders you wish to move from one email account to another.

The downside to doing this is that you will be downloading and re-uploading each and every message, and this can take longer than using IMAPSync due to potential limitations of your internet service.

We created IMAPSync.net so that you have an easy-to-use online tool that migrates email quickly and that you can trust. There are other email synchronization services out there—some paid and some free—but it can be hard to trust a third party with your email.