Business email is the one service most companies never think about until it stops working. Moving it to a new provider can feel risky, because your invoices, customer conversations and supplier contacts all live in those mailboxes. With a little planning, the move is straightforward, and the steps below cover what to do before, during and after the switch.
The reasons are usually practical. You are changing hosting providers anyway, your current mailbox is running out of space, or you want your email hosted somewhere with better support and security. Sometimes the move is about having your email, website and domain under one roof so there is a single provider to call when something goes wrong.
Start by taking stock of what is actually in your email system. Beyond the messages themselves, most businesses hold contacts, calendar appointments and rules or filters that have been built up over years. Export copies of your contacts and calendar from your current provider, and note any shared mailboxes or aliases such as info@ or sales@, because those are easy to forget in a migration.
Keep your old service running until the move is complete. The goal is to copy your data across, not to delete it at the source. Once the new mailboxes are working and you have verified the content arrived, you can close the old account at your own pace.
Tell your team what is happening before the cutover. Everyone should know the date the switch happens, whether their email address stays the same, and what to do if they cannot connect on the morning of the move. If your staff use email signatures, prepare the updated versions in advance, because a signature that still carries the old provider's settings is a small detail that looks unprofessional after a migration.
Your new provider will usually offer a way to bring your old mail across. Many providers offer a migration tool that connects to your old mailbox and copies the folders and messages into your new one. If no tool is available, a standard IMAP connection can do the same job: your email app connects to the old server, downloads everything, and uploads it into the new account.
Large mailboxes take time, so start the copy well before your switchover date rather than on the morning you planned to cut over. Check afterwards that your folders arrived intact, including the sent items, because a migration that copies only the inbox has not copied everything.
The moment that actually moves your email is the change to your MX records. The MX record in your domain's DNS tells other mail servers where to deliver messages for your domain. Until it changes, mail keeps flowing to your old provider. When it changes, new mail starts arriving at your new provider instead.
Because the MX record lives in DNS, the cutover usually takes effect within a few hours as the change spreads. During that window, some senders may still deliver to the old server while others go to the new one. That is normal, and it is exactly why the old mailbox should stay active for a while. Messages sent during the overlap can be forwarded or copied over afterwards.
Once the MX record has updated, test the basics before you announce anything. Send a message to your own address from an external account such as a personal email and confirm it arrives in the new mailbox. Send a message out and confirm it is delivered, ideally to a couple of different providers. Update your phone, tablet and desktop mail apps with the new server settings, and check that shared mailboxes and aliases are working.
If you have email authentication records, confirm they were carried across correctly. SPF and DKIM records are tied to the server that sends your mail, so a new mail server may need new records, and a missing record is the classic reason a freshly moved business suddenly lands in spam folders. Your provider should check these for you as part of the move.
Plan to keep the old mailbox active for at least a week after the cutover, longer if your industry deals in slow-moving correspondence. Automatic replies, old invoices and system notifications can arrive days later, and it is much easier to forward stragglers from a live mailbox than to recover them from a closed account. Set a reminder to close the old service once nothing has arrived for several days.
Hosting Australia includes free migration of your website and email when you move to our hosting, and the team handles the mailbox copies, the MX cutover and the record checks as part of the process. If you are planning to move your business email, contact us first and we can confirm what needs to be exported, what the cutover involves and how to keep your mail flowing through the change.
