Email migration is a process in which an

email Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email was thus conceived as the electronic ( digital) version of, or counterpart to, mail, at a time when "mail" mean ...

or multiple email messages are migrated from one

email client An email client, email reader or, more formally, message user agent (MUA) or mail user agent is a computer program used to access and manage a user's email. A web application which provides message management, composition, and reception functio ...

to another email client. An equivalent term is Mailbox Migration, in which case records such as e-mails, appointments, contacts or tasks may also be migrated. In general, email migration is required when a user is switching from its current email client to a new one. Usually, email clients don't support similar file formats for saving mailbox data.

Scenarios

Mailboxes may be migrated for different reasons. For example, mailboxes may need to be migrated because a company wants to use a new email

service provider A service provider (SP) is an organization that provides services, such as consulting, legal, real estate, communications, storage, and processing services, to other organizations. Although a service provider can be a sub-unit of the organization t ...

. Or mailboxes may need to be migrated following a company

acquisition Acquisition may refer to: * Takeover, the purchase of one company by another * Mergers and acquisitions, transactions in which the ownership of companies or their operating units are transferred or consolidated with other entities * Procurement, ...

merger Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) are business transactions in which the ownership of companies, other business organizations, or their operating units are transferred to or consolidated with another company or business organization. As an aspect ...

. In most cases, a simple one-time migration approach may be employed. However, more advanced scenarios exist, including: * Consolidation: email migration is performed to consolidate multiple accounts into one, for example following an employee's departure. * Backup: email migration is performed to back up or preserve data, for example, to ensure legal

compliance Compliance can mean: Healthcare * Compliance (medicine), a patient's (or doctor's) adherence to a recommended course of treatment * Compliance (physiology), the tendency of a hollow organ to resist recoil toward its original dimensions (this is a ...

. * Coexistence: email migration is performed for evaluation purposes, for example during a migration pilot. * Upgrade: email migration is performed to facilitate an

upgrade Upgrading is the process of replacing a product with a newer version of the same product. In computing and consumer electronics an upgrade is generally a replacement of hardware, software or firmware with a newer or better version, in order to ...

, for example when deploying a new version of an email system.

Procedure

Various technical procedures are normally used to achieve email migration: *

Email forwarding Email forwarding generically refers to the operation of re-sending an email message delivered to one email address to one or more different email addresses. The term ''forwarding'', used for mail since long before electronic communications, has no ...

: this allows a mailbox to forward received content to a designated email address. *

MX record A mail exchanger record (MX record) specifies the mail server responsible for accepting email messages on behalf of a domain name. It is a resource record in the Domain Name System (DNS). It is possible to configure several MX records, typicall ...

modification: this allows a mail server to process emails on behalf of a designated

SMTP The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is an Internet standard communication protocol for electronic mail transmission. Mail servers and other message transfer agents use SMTP to send and receive mail messages. User-level email clients typic ...

domain. * Content conversion: this allows content to be converted, for example from

TNEF Transport Neutral Encapsulation Format or TNEF is a proprietary email attachment format used by Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Exchange Server. An attached file with TNEF encoding is most often named ''winmail.dat'' or ''win.dat'', and has a M ...

MIME Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) is an Internet standard that extends the format of email messages to support text in character sets other than ASCII, as well as attachments of audio, video, images, and application programs. Messa ...

format. * Property mapping: this allows properties to be mapped, for example from

Gmail Gmail is a free email service provided by Google. As of 2019, it had 1.5 billion active user (computing), users worldwide. A user typically accesses Gmail in a web browser or the official mobile app. Google also supports the use of email clien ...

Exchange Exchange may refer to: Physics * Gas exchange is the movement of oxygen and carbon dioxide molecules from a region of higher concentration to a region of lower concentration. Places United States * Exchange, Indiana, an unincorporated community * ...

contacts. * Copy Email: Make a copy of an email from a source mailbox to a destination mailbox

Features

Email migration solutions may implement different features which determine their suitability for different migration scenarios: * Supported systems: defines the list of source and destination systems supported (ex:

IMAP In computing, the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) is an Internet standard protocol used by email clients to retrieve email messages from a mail server over a TCP/IP connection. IMAP is defined by . IMAP was designed with the goal of pe ...

). * Administrative logins: allows administrative login to multiple user mailboxes (ex: using

OAuth OAuth (short for "Open Authorization") is an open standard for access delegation, commonly used as a way for internet users to grant websites or applications access to their information on other websites but without giving them the passwords. Th ...

). * Multi-pass migrations: allows multiple migrations pass without creating duplicates. * Scalability: allows a large set of mailboxes to be migrated concurrently. * Monitoring: allows administrators to monitor migration progress and receive alerts. * Analytics: allows administrators to access statistics such as transfer speed, error rate, etc. * Reliability: allows the migration process to automatically handle or retry errors during migration. * Filtering: allows migration of specific content (ex: date range) from specific locations (ex: folders). * Security: allows migrated content to remain secure, for example using

TLS TLS may refer to: Computing * Transport Layer Security, a cryptographic protocol for secure computer network communication * Thread level speculation, an optimisation on multiprocessor CPUs * Thread-local storage, a mechanism for allocating varia ...

encryption.

References

{{Reflist Email Groupware

Scenarios

Procedure

Features

See also

References