Moving Email accounts from one cPanel server to another

We generally change hosting service providers when we are not happy with the service of your present provider. A major deterrent in doing so is the problem of moving email accounts, especially when you have plenty of them stored on the server and you cannot afford to give them away. So, when you move your hosting account from one server to another, the issue that would bother you most is how you can move all emails stored in the old server to the corresponding email accounts on the new server.

If your hosting cpanel provides for taking full backup of your root directory, an easier method would be to download a full backup from the old server and restore it on the new server. This will automatically create all your email accounts on the new server with same passwords and copy all the old email files. This article becomes relevant when you do not have such a facility or for some reason you do not want to do a full backup-restore (not wanting to disturb your website files on the new server).

In this article I will demonstrate how to move emails from one hosting server to another. This is actually quite a simple task if your source and destination accounts are both on cPanel.

Step 1. Create Email accounts on the new server

As a first step, create all your email accounts on the new server, as they exist on the old server. This can be done from your cPanel control panel on the new server. This can be done usiing , the iconized link you need to click in your new cpanel is - Email Accounts.

Next, connect to your old hosting account via FTP and download all your email related directories and files.

After establishing FTP connection (using any standard ftp client), navigate to the root directory of your hosting account. You will see a directory structure somewhat like shown below.

Step 3: Move Emails to the new server

Next is to connect to the new server via FTP or cpanel file manager. Navigate to the mail directory on the new server. Upload everything that you downloaded from the old mail directory on to the new mail directory. Upload your compressed .zip or .rar file and extract and replace the mail directory. This will copy everything on the new server. If you already had some emails on the new server (in case you decided to move emails from old server after having operated the new one for some time), you do not have to worry. They will remain intact and your old mails will simply get added on to the corresponding directories on the new server.

Once all files are uploaded, you are DONE. You can verify that old mails have indeed moved into your newly created email accounts, by logging into your new email accounts using a webmail interface on port 2096 or yourdomain.com/webmail