Read time 12 minutes
Office 365 is a cloud-based service from Microsoft that compasses various services and applications that alleviate the productivity of any business and big enterprise. The subscription plans of Office 365 are divided based on the applicability of the application and the size of the company. The security of the account is based on the shared model where Microsoft takes care of the availability and accessibility of resources. Users can maintain who can access the account and their level of permissions.
Regular email accounts do not provide such detailed security features. When users want to move their emails to Office 365, you should know the detailed platform information of both source and destination.
In our previous blog, we talked about how to perform IMAP migration to Office 365 with PowerShell commands. here we will talk about migrating other IMAP emails to Office 365, but there are some things that you need to know before migrating your IMAP emails to Office 365.
A few limitations are applied to IMAP to Office 365 migration, which includes:
These are a few limitations that you must be aware of before migrating your IMAP emails to Office 365. Now, let’s move to the steps involved in migrating IMAP mailboxes to Office 365.
There are six steps involved in migrating other IMAP email accounts to Office 365, and performing each of these steps is crucial for flawless migration of mailboxes. The steps include:
Following these steps, you’ll be able to migrate your IMAP data to Office 365 account.
Office 365 requires the same source email server name for migration, so you’ll have to identify the full name of your current IMAP email server.
Before migrating the mailboxes to Office 365, you need access to your IMAP user mailboxes. For this, create a list of mailboxes when you know the password of user mailboxes. This information can be collected from your source email system. If you don’t know the user passwords, you can reset the passwords to new passwords.
To connect with the source email system, Office 365 uses a migration endpoint. You can create the migration endpoint with the following steps:
The new migration endpoint will be created after that.
You need to create a migration batch for bulk migration of emails to Office 365 mailboxes. This migration batch will consist of the mailboxes that you listed in the migration file earlier. Follow the below steps to create a migration batch.
You can verify the status of the task in the Exchange Admin Center.
Every email system uses a DNS record (called MX record), to identify the delivery address for emails. During the email migration process, the MX record is left pointing toward the source email system. After the successful migration to Office 365, you’ll have to point MX record at Office 365. It will ensure that all the emails are delivered to your Office 365 mailboxes.
Generally, it takes around 72 hours for the email systems to recognize the changed MX record. Once it is complete, you can move to the next task to stop email synchronization, but make sure you wait at least 72 hours before moving to the next step.
After changing the MX records, you’ll have to verify that all your emails are being routed to Office 365, and then only you’ll be able to delete the migration batch. Doing so will discontinue the synchronization between your source email system and Office 365. But before that, here are a few things that you need to check:
After deleting the migration batch, the migration service will clear the records related to the migration batch and eliminates it from the migration dashboard.
Deleting a Migration Batch
You can easily remove a migration batch from the Exchange Admin Center.
You can confirm the deletion of migration batch by again visiting the Recipients in Exchange Admin Center.
Seeing the above steps, do you think it’s easy to migrate your IMAP mailboxes to Office 365 with this approach? Surely not. Also, we cannot say that the migration of mailboxes will be successful with this approach because if there is any problem with the migration batch, then you’ll have to repeat the process. So, what’s best for you is to choose an IMAP to Office 365 migration tool that can quickly migrate your mailboxes without much hassle, and one such tool is Kernel IMAP to Office 365 that is specifically designed for the same. Using this software, you can quickly migrate your IMAP mailboxes to Office 365 within a few minutes. Let’s have a quick look at the working process of this IMAP migration tool.
Using this IMAP migration tool is pretty simple, it involves a few steps, and you will successfully migrate your IMAP mailboxes to Office 365 quickly. Also, you can migrate from 20+ IMAP accounts, including Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, Zimbra, etc. Here, we will discuss the process of migrating Gmail mailboxes to Office 365.
First of all, you need to download and configure the software on your system. After installing it, follow the below steps:
That’s how you can easily migrate the Gmail mailbox to Office 365 account quickly with the help of Kernel IMAP to Office 365 migration tool. This utility also allows you to skip already migrated data.
Many organization ions are moving from IMAP to Office 365 for enhanced productivity and security. In such scenarios, migrating with a right approach is necessary. That’s why we have mentioned a technique of IMAP migration in this blog. However, we also recommended a third-party IMAP migration tool that makes IMAP to Office 365 migration quicker.
It is a user-friendly software which allowed me to complete the entire migration process with just a few clicks. I will definitely recommend this software to my friends as well.
It is a complete IMAP migration tool. It has all the essential features in it. Also very easy to access.
This article is pretty lengthy, and I would say that I could not complete it. The software completed the process is less than 4 minutes.
The preparation required to move IMAP account is too much. I had to run the migration in multiple batches for separate accounts.
Is this tool is compatible with all IMAP email clients?
Bradlee, you can migrate any IMAP email client data to Office 365 easily.
Great article. I’ll definitely try Kernel IMAP to Office 365 migration tool, If manual method doesn’t work.