Hi. I am in over my head and asking for help. Around 20 years ago I had an email and domain name only package with Go Daddy. We have four email addresses for the family. It went from under 20 bucks a year to a couple hundred dollars a year. If it makes a difference, I don’t use the webpage, just the email. Go Daddy used to have their own email platform but now use Outlook online. On our phones we just use the email app.
I understand there are other companies out there that will host my email, but I’m not sure how I would switch to another company without losing all of my archives of saved emails. For each account.
I am in over my head. I don’t know what I’m doing anymore. Is there any other service I can switch to that might be less money than Go Daddy that would allow me to keep my emails?
I have searched Reddit, but can’t seem to get a firm understanding. on our phones we just use the email app. I will appreciate any and all advice about how I can get what I’m looking for. Thank you so much.
Imapsync. Used by Linux engineers since forever to copy email accounts from one server to another
To add onto this for OP, if you are unable to dedicate the time to learn enough to utilize imapsync, using a site like Upwork to hire someone to do it for you should still cost less than your yearly spend. Keep in mind anyone using the tool on your behalf would be able to keep a copy of all your emails for themselves, so there is definitely some motivation to learn there.
Oh man I am sort of forever angry for GoDaddy…
I had GoDaddy as my DNS registrar for over a decade. When I first signed up, they offered free email. I didn’t take up on this offer at first because it added complexity - it didn’t seem to work as I wanted (my homeserver is my smtp server). I wanted it to be a backup server by perhaps running a catchall and queue mail to my home server in case it goes down – seemed like something that could be done.
Fast forward to a few years ago. They decided to go with Microsoft as their mail server. No more catchall. No no no, this will not work. at all anymore. So I just gave it up. Sigh.
I ended up just not running an alternate MX as most servers will retry anyway, though I’ve been desubbed a few times with a few mail lists due to bouncing, alas my server has been fairly stable and the bouncing hasn’t happened way too often.
Do you have a custom domain name? If so, that makes it a bit more complicated as you’ll want to transfer DNS as well.
For DNS, I recommend looking at services like NameCheap that specialize in that. They’ll have some documentation around how to transfer DNS registration. You should be able to find other options for DNS searching this subreddit as well.
The second thing will be email hosting. One of the more popular ones out there these days is Fastmail. They have some documentation about how to migrate your emails over which is basically just allowing for an IMAP connection. Other email providers can also be found by searching through this subreddit.
Lastly, I would do these things one at a time. Migrating emails might be easier to do first, then update all the DNS stuff to point to your new server, then change registration of DNS. Reaching out to the DNS and Email providers, their support crews should be able to help fill in specifics of how to do that.
simple version:
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save your existing mail locally
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point the DNS record of your domain name at whatever new service you are buying (they should have instructions on that)
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import some / all / none of the mail you saved locally to the new service as you see fit
now your email will come and go from your new mail service
That way he would still have to keep the domain on GoDaddy for the DNS record I believe…
I think nearly every hoster offers free domain transfer so you can keep the domain but with a different hoster underneath
This isn’t too bad. Get yourself a good imap client (I use Thunderbird, but many will do). Copy all email into local folders.
Migrate your hosting to a new provider. Then you can just as easily push your locally copied messages up.
There are also specific email backup / migration tools, but TBH, I’ve never really seen the need.
