Transferring an old email archive to your new gov.uk mailbox (IMAP Provider)

Transferring an old email archive to your new gov.uk mailbox (IMAP Provider)

Overview

When moving to a new gov.uk mailbox with Parish Online you may feel lost without your historic archive of emails saved with your old provider.

Fortunately there's a process for sucking up that email archive and storing it in your new gov.uk mailbox.

This tutorial will guide you through the process.
Note: this transfer is only for transferring from an old provider, rather than Gmail or other services.

Things you will need

  1. The IMAP URL for your previous provider. The simplest way to get this is to ask your provider, but if you can't get an answer from them you can:
    1. Tell Parish Online who the provider is (we keep a list of IMAP URLs for various providers, and they might already be on our list).
    2. If you're using Outlook or any 3rd party mail app, the IMAP URL will be in the Account Settings
  2. A list of all the mailboxes you have with your previous provider. e.g. clerk@ councillor.bob@ etc.
  3. A list of all the passwords associated with those mailboxes. The best idea here is to set new passwords for all the mailboxes. This way, you're not sharing potentially personal passwords with Parish Online. Most suppliers are happy to do this for you, and even some of the grumpy ones!

Things you should check

  1. How much storage is each mailbox using up? Parish Online gov.uk mailboxes have 5GB of storage each. If you need more Parish Online can apply more to your account for a small fee. If you don't want to pay extra, now is a good time to have a bit of a spring clean. Check your sent items, check for large attachments, and delete items in your Trash folder.

Method 1 - Get Parish Online to do it

If you've used up all the hours in your week and can't face tackling this, send the details you've collected from the previous section and send it all to Parish Online. We'll happily set this all up for you.

Method 2 - Use the Email Admin Panel to do it

  1. Log into your email Admin Panel: https://mailadmin.zoho.eu
    1. Use your normal clerk email address and password
  2. Go to Data Migration
  3. Click Start Data Migration
  4. Give it a name e.g. "Transfer from Old Provider"
  5. Select IMAP as the protocol
  6. Check the Others button
  7. Enter the IMAP URL in the Source server address box
  8. Leave the rest and click Add
  9. On the next page, leave everything as-is, click Add
  10. On the next page, set the storage limit to 95% and click Create
  11. Click the Users tab
  12. Click Add and enter:
    1. the old email address, e.g. councillor.bob@mappington.org.uk
    2. the old password, e.g. ParishOnlineMigration123!
    3. the new email address. e.g. councillor.bob@mappington.gov.uk
  13. Repeat adding the users for each mailbox
  14. Click Start Migration
This will then churn away and port over your old emails. It may take up to 24 hours to complete depending on how many emails you have.

You can close the Mail Admin Panel tab and even shut down your computer if necessary, the process will continue no matter what.


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