Transferring Emails from Plesk to Email Hosting

Question: I want to use the email hosting service and transfer my emails from the Plesk panel. What steps should I follow?

Related to: webhosting | email hosting

Introduction:

As you are accustomed, with the purchase of a hosting package, in addition to hosting a website, a hosting service provider offers email hosting addresses within the same package without additional cost.

In the control panel of our provider (plesk/cpanel/virtualmin etc.) we will find the tools to create email addresses with our domain name in the form of, for example, info@mydomain.gr

However, there are cases where the functionality of the control panel is not sufficient and we need additional features and tools for our email and our team.

At the same time, from design, the control panels are installed on single servers (bare metal or virtual) which means downtime risk in case of damage. In cases where a Plesk or Cpanel is installed on a high availability virtual machine, the risk is still smaller for downtime but we still don't have the functionality we need.

At WebHosting|4U, we have implemented a separate and independent email hosting service, exclusively and only for providing email hosting in a high availability environment with support from multiple systems, high deliverability score and zero downtime risk.

See the email hosting service here

It is enriched with multiple features and packages and is designed to allow collaboration between colleagues and teams. It supports whitelabel functionality from resellers.

The process you should follow:

Regardless of the sequence you follow, the only action that will affect email functionality is changing the MX records. Any other action does not affect functionality.

Below, we describe the sequence we recommend, the steps you should follow so that the email service for a domain name stops working from the Plesk panel and works from the email hosting service.

1. We log in to the Plesk panel and find the DNS Settings option

We open the Settings tab and see the value of the TTL field

The default value is 1 day (24 hours). This means that if we make a change to the DNS zone of a domain, the change will be updated to the other name servers of the planet after 24 hours.

We change the TTL value to 15 minutes, one day before making the overall changes to the domain. For example, if we want to make the changes on Sunday, we ideally want to have changed the TTL from Friday.

With this change, the DNS will be updated globally within 15 minutes on the day of the changes.

2. We log in to the email control panel (if you have a reseller account) or to our customer area, if you are a simple customer. We create the domain name and email addresses.

3. With the ImapCopy tool, we transfer the content of the mailbox from the Plesk server to the email hosting. By clicking on the drop-down menu in the mail server address, we select the server.

After transferring the content of the mailbox, we are ready to proceed with the changes to the DNS settings.

The changes to be made are described in the following article
https://webhosting4u.gr/oldwh4u/docs/email-hosting-mx-records

As soon as the MX records are updated, the Plesk server stops receiving emails.

3. After the DNS changes, we need to stop email functionality from the Plesk panel.

From the mail settings of the Plesk, we select Disabled for incoming mail or Not configured.

We reset the DNS TTL to its default value of 24 hours.

We delete the DKIM entry from the Plesk panel and the SPF entry.

We do not add a second SPF txt entry, but modify the existing one.

Frequently Asked Questions:

- The domain name registrar is not WebHosting|4U. Does it affect the process?

No, the process is not affected.

- The nameservers of the domain are with another provider. Can I continue the process?

Yes, you can continue the process. You will follow exactly the same steps as if it were in our shared hosting.

- In a later stage of the process, I need to change the registrar;

Technically, it is not necessary to change the registrar. However, you can start the process whenever you want.

- My provider (cosmote/wind/vodafone etc.) has not been informed yet. What should I do?

The name servers of the providers maintain their own reload time and frequency of updating their DNS cache. Also, many name servers do not respect the TTL that we have set in our DNS zone. In this case, we cannot do anything. We need to wait for their update.

- When declaring MX records, I need to delete the previous ones;

Yes. The previous MX records need to be deleted at the same time that we update our DNS entries with the new MX records. The same for DKIM and SPF.