How do I migrate to another email provider or change my IMAP server details?
Google Workspace (formerly G Suite) or Office 365
If you are migrating to or from Google Workspace or Office 365, you may skip to the section below.
IMAP servers
The Missive interface does not let users modify the hostname of an IMAP / SMTP account in-place because there’s a chance that the new hostname would point to a different email account with different emails, which would corrupt existing Missive conversations (lose assignment, chat comments, etc).
There are usually two different situations where people need to change the hostname of an email account:
- An internal change at your email hosting provider, requiring a simple hostname update.
- A migration to another provider, which involves transferring all emails between servers.
If you know your emails are still on the same physical IMAP server and only the hostname must be updated, just email us at support@missiveapp.com and tell us the new hostname (do not tell us the password). We will double-check that the emails still have the same internal IDs and then proceed to update the hostname in-place for you.
If you are migrating to a different email hosting provider, then it’s too risky to change the hostname in-place because copies of the emails on the new server will be almost guaranteed to have different internal IDs. This means you must connect your new account(s) to Missive and migrate past emails to these new accounts before removing your previous accounts from Missive.
Steps
Here is the order in which things should be done:
Keep your current email accounts connected to Missive. This is very important to avoid losing Missive data such as chat comments, assignment, labels, snoozes, etc.
Connect your new accounts to Missive. If some of these accounts are shared in Missive (team inboxes like info@, support@), configure your newly connected email accounts with the same sharing settings.
If you have aliases defined in Missive, you must recreate them on your new accounts.
Change your domain’s MX records to point to your new email provider. This is done through your domain registrar or DNS / hosting provider’s interface. Once this is done, you will start receiving emails @yourdomain.com into your new accounts instead of your old accounts.
If you have defined incoming or outgoing email rules using the Email account condition, you must update these rules to reference the new account(s).
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Transfer all your emails from your old email accounts to your new ones.
If you are moving to Google Workspace, use their Data Migration service. If you are moving to Office 365, see this help article from Microsoft. You may then skip to the next point below.
If you are moving to an IMAP server, the process is usually done using a traditional email client like Apple Mail, Mozilla Thunderbird or Outlook. It should be a matter of having the two accounts connected to the app, selecting all emails from an account and drag-and-dropping them to the other account, like explained in this guide by hosting provider MediaTemple. The process is the same for any provider.
This step may take anywhere from a few minutes to several hours depending on the number of emails. As soon as the transfer begins, Missive will start synchronizing copies of the emails from the new accounts.
Wait for all these emails to be re-imported in Missive via the new accounts. They will be linked to existing Missive conversations behind the scenes; no duplication will happen. You can contact us at support@missiveapp.com so we can check on our side to make sure that this process is completed.
When the previous steps are done, you can remove your old accounts from Missive. Since your conversations will now also reference the new copies of your emails, deleting the old copies won’t delete the Missive conversations, and neither their assignment nor comments.
