Hello.
I have a client who wants to transfer his site to my server.
He has 20 email accounts.
I'm not sure what his current host uses but I run cpanel.
How do I do the transfer things so that there is little or no disruption to the email?
Will all emails currently stored on the server (on some webmail system) be lost when he transferes to me?
Should I tell all his employees to just back-up emails because they will be lost?
Thanks in advance.
Anthony

Back up his current cpanel and transfer it over to yours.

Backing up is a good idea you never know if things will go wrong. If they are not on cpanel you will need to manually add each alias however if they are on cpanel it is easily done with the copy script on cpanel.

During the transfer there will be a desync with the emails where some emails will go to your previous host and some will be going to yours. Thus to access your previous hosts email simply use the ip rather than the DNS. This should allow you to check your emails until DNS is fully propogated globally.

If the current host uses cpanel then you should be able to use the account transfer feature in whm, provided the other host is not blocking it.

This is not foolproof (eg custom dns zone entries can get mangled) but it is sually pretty good.

If not, then you will probably have to manually transfer everything across and set up the email accounts again.

Regardless of the method you use, there will be disruption of 2-3 days while the domain resolves to the new server.
During this time, users should check email at their old AND new server to ensure they don't miss anything. To do this, they should access the mail server by IP and not domain name so that they know they are definitely hitting the old, or the new server as the case may be.

If you can use cpanel transfer then no webmail should be lost. If not, then probably, yes, unless you can transfer the individual mail files across too and they are in the same format etc...

As disofthosting stated, if they are not the same control panel, then Imap mail will more than likely be lost..

Thanks for the responses.
As stated, he doesn't have cpanel so it looks like some emails will be lost, hope that's not too big a deal for him.
Thanks again!

Originally posted by aspotism
Thanks for the responses.
As stated, he doesn't have cpanel so it looks like some emails will be lost, hope that's not too big a deal for him.
Thanks again!
Emails should not be lost. As was previously posted:
Regardless of the method you use, there will be disruption of 2-3 days while the domain resolves to the new server.
During this time, users should check email at their old AND new server to ensure they don't miss anything. To do this, they should access the mail server by IP and not domain name so that they know they are definitely hitting the old, or the new server as the case may be.

That will ensure that they do not lose a single piece of mail.

- Matt