In this article, we will discuss the most secure and reliable method to migrate from IMAP to Office 365. You need to follow the complete article to get full information on the migration of IMAP to Office 365 with manual steps and a professional approach.
Office 365 is the most preferred cloud-based email service provider. It allows email users to access their email accounts from multiple devices. You can log in to your email account using a desktop, laptop, mobile phone, and tablet. Email accounts can be accessed using Office 365 webmail or the Microsoft Outlook application. Office 365 offers a lot many benefits like customization, mailbox, password recovery, and support. It provides great options to the users to backup their emails to the cloud. Email account migration from IMAP to Office 365 account is a very simple process. If you have a third-party email application installed.
Some Points to Remember Before Migration
There are some important points that you need to remember before going to migrate from IMAP to office 365.
- This method is not compatible to migrate calendars, contacts, or tasks. It can only migrate users’ inboxes and other mail folders to Office 365 accounts.
- Users can migrate email sizes up to 35 MB in size.
- Migration of a maximum of 5,00,000 data items from a user’s mailbox is allowed.
- First, you have to create an Office 365 account to migrate IMAP mailboxes.
- For using the email domain of IMAP in an Office 365 account, you’ll have to add the domain to Office 365 before creating users. Also, you can check how to add users to Office 365.
After remembering all the points, now let’s begin to migrate IMAP mailbox to Office 365. All you have to do is follow the step-by-step process.
Also Read: Resolve IMAP AOL.Com Not Responding Error
How to Migrate Email from IMAP to Office 365?
The following process involved six steps to migrate from IMAP to Office 365. You need to follow each step in a proper sequence to avoid any complications.
Step 1: Identifying the Full Name of Your Current Email Server
In this step, MS Office 365 requires the same source email server name for the migration, so you will have to identify the full name of your current IMAP email server.
- Launch your Outlook for web application and Open your mailbox.
- Navigate the Settings in the toolbar and enter pop in the Search all settings box.
- Now, choose POP and IMAP from the displayed result.
- Here the IMAP server name will be listed in the IMAP setting section.
Step 2: Create a List of Mailbox to Migrate
So before transferring an IMAP mailbox to Office 365, you need to access your IMAP user mailboxes. For this, you need to create a list of mailboxes when you know the password of the user mailboxes. Therefore, this information can be collected from your source email system. Thus, if you don’t know the user password, you can reset the password to get the new password.
Step 3: Connect Office 365 to the Email System
To connect with the source email system, Office 365 uses a migration endpoint. You can create the migration endpoint with the following steps to migrate from IMAP to office 365:
- First, go to the Exchange Admin Center and click on the Recipients.
- Choose the Migration tab and click on the More tab to choose Migration endpoints.
- Now, to create the new migration endpoint, click on the New + icon.
- Then, choosing the migration endpoint type page will appear on the screen in which you click the IMAP button.
- After that, enter the following details to the IMAP migration configuration page.
- Here leave the rest information as it is and press the Next button.
- In the next step, the migration services will test the connection to the email server and if it works, the general info page will display on the screen.
- At last, type the Migration endpoint name. Leave the other boxes completely blank and click new to create the migration endpoint.
Step 4: Creating a Migration Batch and Migrating Mailboxes
First, you need to create a migration batch for the bulk migration of emails to Office 365 account mailbox. This migration batch will consist of the mailbox items that you listed in the migration file earlier. So follow the below-listed steps to create a migration batch to migrate from IMAP to office 365.
- Go to the Exchange Admin Center and click on the Recipients of the migration.
- Click on the New + option and then Migrate to Exchange Online.
- Choose the IMAP migration and tap on the Next button.
- Now, the user page will appear on the screen, click on the Browse button to choose the migration file that you have created. (Note: Here Office 365 will quickly run to check the file to verify whether it’s accurate or not.
- After that, if the file is verified by Office 365, the number of users listed in the file will be displayed as the number of mailboxes to migrate. After file validation, press the Next button.
- Then, the IMAP migration configuration page will display on the screen in which you hit the Next button.
- Choose the migration endpoint that you have created in step 3.
- Navigate to the Move Migration page, and type the name of the migration batch. Press the Next button.
- Here you can also exclude the folder from the migration process by entering the name or selecting the + icon. Click Next.
- At last, the start batch page will be displayed on the screen, so take the following actions:
— Choose the Browse button for sending a copy of the migration report to others. The migration report can also be accessed from the properties page of the migration batch.
— Choose Automatically start the batch. After that, the migration process will begin when you save the migration batch. Then, the status of the migration batch will change to sync from created.
In the above process, you can verify the status of the task in the Exchange Admin Center.
Step 5: Directly Route Your Email to Office 365
The email system uses a DNS (MX record), to recognize the delivery address for emails. Hence, during the email migration process, the DNS record is left pointing towards the source email system. After that, you have to point the MX record at Office 365 after the successful migration. Therefore, it will ensure that all the emails are delivered to your Office 365 mailbox.
Usually, it takes up to 72 hours for the email system to identify the changes in the MX record. Therefore, once it is completed, you can move to the next task to stop email synchronization. But keep in mind that you have to wait at least 72 hours before proceeding to the next step. Also, this step is very crucial to migrate from IMAP to office 365.
Step 6: Discontinuing Email Synchronization
- First, visit the Exchange Admin Center and navigate to Recipients and choose the Migration option.
- Click on the Delete for the selective batch from the migration dashboard.
- After that, you can confirm the deletion of the migration batch by visiting the Recipients in the Exchange Admin Center.
Automated Approach to Migrate IMAP Email to Office 365
Cigati IMAP Backup Tool is an effective utility that is well capable of migrating IMAP emails to PST, PDF, MBOX, EML, EMLX, HTML, MSG, DOC, CSV, and many more file formats. You can also migrate from IMAP to Office 365, Gmail, Yahoo, Thunderbird, Hotmail, iCloud, Amazon webmail, etc. Also, the software downloads and converts multiple IMAP emails at once. Apart from that, this utility is inbuilt with multiple advanced features that ensure a smooth working experience for its users.
Conclusion
We hope you enjoyed this article about how to migrate from IMAP to Office 365. With this knowledge, we know that you can easily migrate emails from one account to another. If you have any other questions about setting up an IMAP to Office 365 account, please contact us anytime. Thank you for reading, we are always excited when one of our posts is able to provide useful information on a topic like this!