Question

Moving from Site5 to DigitalOcean, but how can I move my emails?

Posted September 9, 2014 3.8k views

Hello there, right now I’m migrating a group of websites from Site5 shared hosting to Digital Ocean’s droplets.

The only thing that is making me crazy is how to move all the email accounts and email messages from there to my droplet (I’m using Ubuntu 14.04 x64), that means that I also have to set up a mail server inside my droplets. Can somebody please give me some guidance on this? I will really appreciate it.

Regards!

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arturocr
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arturocr

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Sinklar September 9, 2014

I guess you don’t have access to the email server files and directories on your shared hosting. So the easiest way to migrate your emails would be to create the email accounts on the new server and then copy everything over IMAP.

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  • arturocr September 11, 2014

    Thanks for your answer @tbnv…
    I do have access to the file system… How does it help me?

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  • Sinklar September 12, 2014
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  • Sinklar September 12, 2014

    You need to :

    1. Create the email accounts on the server
    2. Download your email files and folders from the shared hosting
    3. Upload that on the server

    The files are often located in one of these locations:

    /var/mail/
/var/spool/mail/
/var/vmail/

    But it depends on the server configuration and can be located anywhere, actually. It’s important to note that the server configuration may be completely different. Not only about the main directory. For example the structure can be:

    /var/mail/user_1@domain.com
/var/mail/user_2@domain.com

    But it could be like this:

    domain.com/user_1
domain.com/user_2

    I can’t tell you more as I don’t know how the shared hosting and server are configured.

    There is also a tool called imapsync but I never tested it. It’s quite easy to find tutorial about how to use it, like this one.

    Maybe neither won’t work. I am surprised that your shared hosting allows you to access the complete file system, maybe there are some limitations.

    The last resort may be the easiest one: transfer over IMAP. It’s a bit tedious but it always works.

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