Moving to a Different Email Provider

Time: one evening for the move, two weeks of running both. Repeat: every few years, whether you planned to or not.

Separate what travels from what does not

Understand before you start that a move has six parts and only some of them come with you. The mail itself travels well. Contacts travel with an export file. Calendar entries usually travel. Filters, spam training and the access you have granted to apps do not travel at all, and the address travels only if the domain belongs to you.

That last point is the one that decides how the whole project feels. An address ending in your provider's domain is a permanent loan. You can copy every message you ever received and still have to tell three hundred services where to find you, because the part after the at sign was never yours.

Choose the new provider on things you can check

Judge providers on published, verifiable behaviour rather than on interface screenshots. Five things are worth checking before you commit, and all five are answerable in ten minutes on the provider's own help pages.

Does it offer a full export of your mail in a standard format, and can you run that export yourself without asking anyone? Does it support IMAP, so a mail program can talk to it? Can you attach a domain you own? Does it publish its inactivity rules, so you know what happens if you stop signing in? And is there a route to a human when an automated system decides something about your account?

A provider that hides the export is telling you what leaving will be like. That is the most useful signal available before you have any experience with them.

Make your own copy before anything moves

Run a full backup of the old mailbox first, and keep it after the move is finished. This is fifteen minutes of setup and it is the only thing standing between an interrupted transfer and a lost decade of mail.

The reason is not distrust of the new provider. Transfers stall, quotas get hit halfway, and accounts occasionally get suspended by automation at exactly the wrong moment. A local archive means any of those is an annoyance rather than a loss. Keeping your own copy covers the formats and where to store them.

While you are looking at the old mailbox, look at its size. If it holds fifteen years of newsletters and every attachment anyone ever sent you, the import will take days and may hit the new account's quota on arrival. Thinning it first is faster than importing it and thinning it later; what is safe to delete is a short job that makes this one shorter.

Import with the method that suits the mailbox

Use the new provider's own import tool if it has one, because it handles rate limits and resumes on its own. Give it the old account's details, start it, and leave it alone; a large mailbox can take several days and watching it does not help.

Use a mail program over IMAP instead when the built-in import refuses your old provider, when you want to control exactly which folders move, or when the import has already failed once. Connect both accounts in the program, then drag folder by folder. It is slower and it is completely under your control.

Two things go wrong often enough to expect them. Labels do not survive as labels: a message with three labels arrives as three copies in three folders, which is why you deduplicate after the import rather than during it. And providers throttle bulk copying, so a transfer that appears frozen is usually just being polite. Check the message count rather than the clock.

Rebuild what refused to travel

Set aside an hour after the import to recreate the parts that never move. This is the step people skip, and then conclude the new provider is worse when it is simply empty.

Filters and rules have to be written again by hand. Take a screenshot of the old ones before you close the account, because reading them from memory does not work. Your spam training is gone too, so expect a few weeks of correcting the new filter; it learns from what you mark, not from your history elsewhere. Signatures, vacation replies, aliases and any per-sender settings are all manual. So is the list of apps you have connected, and that one is an opportunity: grant access only to the apps you still actually use.

Move the address by inventory, then run both for two weeks

Change the address on your accounts only after the mail has finished copying and you can sign into the new mailbox comfortably. Work from an inventory in the order described in changing your email address: the accounts that can reset other accounts, then money, then documents and work, then everything else.

Keep both mailboxes receiving for at least two weeks with forwarding on from the old one, and longer if you can. During that window you are looking for two things: senders you forgot, and mail that arrives at the new provider but lands somewhere unexpected. Both are cheap to fix while both accounts are open and expensive to fix afterwards.

Send yourself a few test messages from outside, including one with an attachment, and confirm they arrive where you expect. Providers differ on what they consider suspicious, and finding that out on a real invoice is worse than finding it out on a test.

Close the old account on purpose, not by drifting away

Decide deliberately what happens to the old mailbox, and write the decision down. Doing nothing is also a decision, and it is the one with the worst timing.

If the old address was widely used, keep the account alive, sign in a few times a year and let forwarding run. If it was barely used, close it properly: check that no account still lists it as a recovery contact, confirm your archive opens, and then delete it. What providers do when you neither close nor visit an account is in what happens to an abandoned mailbox, and the summary is that they eventually decide for you.

Buy a domain if you do not want to do this again

Register a domain if the reason you are moving is that you dislike the provider rather than the address. It converts every future move into a change of MX records, with the address untouched and nobody to notify.

It is not free and it is not zero maintenance: there is an annual bill and a renewal that must never be missed. Email on a domain you own sets out the real cost and the failure mode. But it is the only version of this project you do once instead of every five years.

One last thing to leave behind while you are here: whatever address you land on, do not hand it to every form that asks. A single-use signup that only needs to receive one code can go to a disposable inbox that cleans up after itself instead, and your new mailbox starts its life quiet.

The checklist

• Check export, IMAP, custom domains, inactivity rules and support before choosing.
• Back up the old mailbox and keep the copy after the move.
• Thin the mailbox before importing rather than after.
• Import with the provider's tool, or folder by folder over IMAP if it fails.
• Rebuild filters, signatures and app access by hand, and screenshot the old ones first.
• Change addresses by inventory, run both mailboxes for two weeks, then close the old one deliberately.