Overview
When migrating from a previous hosting provider or even consolidating user accounts, it may be necessary to incorporate email from elsewhere into your account. This can be achieved through a variety of ways, from easiest to most cumbersome.
Migration techniques
SquirrelMail Fetchmail
SquirrelMail, a webmail client available within the control panel via Mail > Webmail, or through http://<server name>/webmail includes support to download mail from a remote server and merge it with your inbox. To get started:
- Login to SquirrelMail per the correct location; universally, it will be accessible via http://<server name>/webmail
- Can’t login? Check your credentials.
- Once logged in, go to Options > POP3 Fetchmail
- Enter your credentials of your old mail server
- If migrating from a hosting provider, use your old mail server IP address. Often times this is just the hostname of your old host or old cPanel address.
- When in doubt, contact your old hosting provider to request the “IMAP/POP3 server IP address”.
- Optionally, to make this continuous, i.e. letting SquirrelMail act as an aggregate email collector, select “Check mail at login“
- Click Add Server
Sample dialog entry in SquirrelMail
- Return to the inbox overview, then click on Fetch to begin downloading email
Fetch action present after configuring a server to download from.
Direct copy
If coming from another provider that stores email in a Maildir or Maildir++ format, i.e. each message resides in a separate file and email is stored in a folder called “cur/“, then these files may be copied directly over. Messages will be picked up automatically by the mail server and incorporated into your existing mailbox(es). Messages for a user should be copied into Mail/cur/ located within that user’s home directory. For a discussion on mailbox layout, see KB: Email filesystem layout.