• The Horde webmail has been deprecated. Its complete removal is scheduled for April 2025. For details and recommended actions, see the Feature and Deprecation Plan.
  • We’re working on enhancing the Monitoring feature in Plesk, and we could really use your expertise! If you’re open to sharing your experiences with server and website monitoring or providing feedback, we’d love to have a one-hour online meeting with you.

Resolved Migrating Plesk on a new server without losing mails

LaurentR2D2

Plesk Certified Professional
Plesk Certified Professional
Hello,

I'm changing my server. Since the new one has a new IP and that I will have to change it for all my domains, how should I do to not lose any mail ? Is there a way to sync only the mails from my old server once the dns target the new one so I can get all the mails arrived during the dos propagation ?

Thank you
 
I don't think that there's any Plesk utility that will just sync emails between the two servers. However, there are a number of tools which might allow you to do that separately after the main migration, and allowing time for the new DNS records to propagate.
The one I've used in the past is imapsync.
 
When you are using the Plesk migrator extension a migration has two steps:
1) Basic migration of your users, subscriptions and so on.
2) "update" and syncing the latest changes from the source to the destination.
I admit though, that I am not sure whether single mails that exist in the source will be recognized and migrated to the destination when syncing.

The issue here is something very basic: No matter what you do and how short you set the DNS TTL value for MX entries, there will always be systems that still send mails to the old server while others are sending it to the new server. You will always have an overlap between two servers, because routers on the Internet update their routing tables at their own discretion. The trick normally is to setup the new mailboxes in addition to the old mailboxes for a while. A few days after migration took place, simply drag and drop mails that might still have arrived on the old server into the new mailboxes, then take the old mailboxes offline. It is not necessary to use a specific tool for that, and probably it is counter-productive.
 
Sorry for the late answer. Thank you for your advice. I've finally done like this :
1) I've made the change in the DNS
2) When I've been sure that all the domains were pointing on the new ip, I've connected to Plesk on the source server, and I've made a mail backup for all the domains needing it via ftp on a backup server. I have a small amount of domains, so it was not a big work :)
3) After downloading the backups on my computer, I've uncompressed them, and I've used Emailchemy to convert maildirs to mbox format all the mails starting from the day I've launched the DNS changes. This way, I just had to send the mbox files to the people concerned so they can import them in their mail software and check for eventual missing mails.
 
Back
Top