Email backup question

[gracec]

So I am working on switching a domain from Microsoft Office Live to Hostmonster, and I have a question about backing up email- The old hosting service provides mail through Hotmail, and we will be using the same addresses and everything on Hostmonster, but is it possible to back up all the information in someone's webmail/Hotmail account on a hard drive? Can all past emails be forwarded to the same email account, once the client program is set up? Basically, I'm just trying to save the backlog of mail so that I still have access to it all. Help please?

[shadmego]

I'm not quite sure what you are asking ...

From what I understand, your users are using "@hotmail" email addresses for the website? If this is true, then nothing has to happen as you can simply use the same hotmail account on HM.

I'm probably way off with what I think is going on, and if so, I apologize. It's sort of confusing to me what you are asking. Plus, I only got a couple hours of sleep last night ... I see two computer screens right now ..........

~regards

[gracec]

No, they are using @the domain name addresses, but since we bought the domain and hosting initially through MSN/Microsoft, our mail runs off of hotmail. We haven't transferred the domain to HM yet because I'm trying to make sure my users don't lose information in their email accounts. They want to still have all their old emails they've saved and contact lists and so forth to be exactly the same.

What I'm asking is, is it possible to back up email in such a way that the users will still have access to all past email on their account. Are they going to have to forward everything to themselves, or can I make a backup on the hard drive, or set a mail client to pick up all the old stuff and store it, or is this not going to work?

And no worries, the whole thing is kind of confusing anyway. I blame the extremely poor quality of MSN/Microsoft's website-for-dummies service. :)

[shadmego]

hehe .... why do I not doubt you? Depending on the level of service, you may be able to keep your MX Entry the same as it is now, and have your email still being handled by MSN servers (hotmail). Somehow I doubt this will work, though, considering the service provider.

If that's the case, you will have to ask Microsoft if it is possible to download a backup file of all the email accounts/addresses/contacts/etc to take with you. The only other option I can think of, barring the availability of the administrative download, is to have your users save everything on their desktop in Outlook/Outlook Express, or whatever email client they are using. That way, they have to manage their own emails because they would be downloaded onto their own desktops.

I know there is a way to transfer email account info (emails/contact/etc) from hotmail to gmail, so let me look through there. I might find a clue to what you can do to accomplish your goals.

Give me some time to find out for you ...

~regards

[vlaarjos]

I think forwarding isn't a good option because then the date of all email will be set to the date of forwarding instead of the original date, plus it will be a lot of work. I think moving to Google Apps is the right solution for you. I'll describe the steps you should take to get everything done.

- Find out whether your hosting package at Microsoft includes free POP access to all your email accounts (POP is what is used to download email from an emailaccount/inbox, keeping the dates as they are of course). If not, you have to temporarily buy 'MSN Hotmail Plus' for each account. Temporarily because it will enable POP access and it comes with a 30-day money back garantee. You should be able to buy it (creditcard needed, costs $20 per account), download all email within 30 days and when done cancel it to get your money back. Gmail offers free POP downloading and access btw, in the contrary to M$ (ability to download mail from other accounts via POP and provide its own mails via POP).

- Meanwhile, sign up with Google Apps (http://www.google.com/a/). It's a free service for domains that enables people to have a gmail account@theirowndomain.com (so not @gmail.com), and it also offers other services for the domain and it's users (the users are setup by you/the admin). Be sure that when signing up with Apps you use a different admin username then the email adress you want to use daily, as you don't want anyone hacking your daily account also directly gaining control over the Apps account and all of it's users (making the hack unrecoverable). Also don't validate your domain in Apps yet, it's better to do that when the domain is transferred to Hostmonster and you've got everything setup.

- Add users in Apps. There's an easy way described in Apps to add multiple accounts at the same time using a csv file (and Excel). Use the same usernames as they currently have for Hotmail, and create a separate temporary account for each one as well (eg. if the real email adress is monkey@domain.com, add an account for both monkey@domain.com and monkeytemp@domain.com). The reason you have to create a temp account is the fact Gmail won't let you add a POP download adress for the same email adress as the current users account adress, as jlm pointed me to later in this tread (so monkey@domian.com at Apps can't download from monkey@domain.com at Hotmail, so we put monkeytemp@domain.com in between to make an email flow from monkey@hotmail-monkeytemp@apps-monkey@apps. Create one and the same password for every account, since you'll have to enter each one of them frequently during setup.

- Now, enter each individual users temp Gmail accounts and go to settings/accounts and enable POP for all messages. Then go to each users real account and add the temp account to download from via POP (use the same server/port/username settings as Gmail Help tells you to use on a desktop client). Now, add the appropriate POP account (hosted at microsoft) to download the mails from (request the POP access details Gmail asks for from Microsoft) in the temp account (which will activate our email flow). When succesfully completed, remove all temp and Hotmail POP accounts from each real/temp accounts settings/accounts page in their Gmail account (delete the email flow).

Tip: I think POP downloading from Hotmail will only download mails in the Inbox folder, so if you want to keep the users directory structure you can first download it's Hotmail inbox, then clear it's Hotmail inbox, mark all email in Gmail as 'read', move the mails from a particular Hotmail folder over to Inbox (downloading starts again), add a label in Gmail and apply it to all newly downloaded unread mail, mark as read again, delete Hotmail inbox again and so on. Sent mail automatically gets sorted and placed in the right folder by Gmail (since the email adress is the same it will recognise a downloaded mail with 'from: adress@domain.com' as one the Gmail user himself (sameadress@domain.com) sent, so there's no need to make a label for sent mail, or to download the Hotmail sent folder separately (in fact it's better to download it in the same time as the original (first) Inbox folder, as conversations will probably be stored better when done so, but I don't know that for sure). You can also transfer all contacts by exporting them to a csv file in Hotmail and importing that csv file in Gmail.

- When all email and contacts are transferred: cancel all Hotmail Plus and make sure you get your money back (if you had to buy it in the first place) and generate a unique password for each Apps user (they'll be able to change it later themselves). Also delete the temp accounts from Apps cpanel.

- You can now transfer you domain to Hostmonster and end everything you got at Microsoft.

- When done it's time to configure Hostmonster to work with Google Apps, so first validate your domain at Google Apps (how to do it is discribed in Apps).

- Now change the MX entry in Hostmonster to the Google servers (how to do/change it is discribed in Google Apps, be sure to not use MAIN CHARACTERS when entering the MX adress in Hostmonster, but use normal characters). You'll probably want to add some of the Google backup/secondary MX entries as well. Note that (HM's) cPanel only supports 1 MX record per priority (so don't add multiple Google MX entries with the same priority like Apps tells you to do, but use a different priority for each one, but dó keep Google's order of importance for the MX entries you make). By changing the MX record you basically said: 'I want mail sent to anyadress@mydomain.com not to be handled by the mailservers for mydomain.com (which is Hostmonster), but by the Google mailservers (where your Google Apps account and it's users are configured on for mydomain.com so they can recieve the email). Changing the MX-setting will also enable/activate the Gmail service in Apps, which has to be activated separately from the domain.

- Create a subdomain called gmail.yourdomain.com in Hostmonster (or any other subdomainname.domain.com). If you choose mail.yourdomain.com that will disable the Hostmonster webmail access at mail.yourdomain.com (which is enabled by default). You can either redirect that subdomain to the Google Apps adress (which is mail.google.com/a/domain.com), or, if you want gmail.domain.com to stay in the adress bar, you can request Hostmonster to create a CNAME record for gmail.domain.com to ghs.google.com (read Apps instructions) and set Google Apps to use gmail.domain.com as well instead of it's default mail.google.com/a/domain.com. There is no way to make a CNAME record via HM cpanel so you have to submit a ticket for that. If you want to use any other subdomain for the other Google Apps services you have to set/redirect/CNAME that adress as well in the same way.

- Done, everything stayed the same for the users except they now use Gmail via gmail.domain.com

Hope things work out for you this way, let me know if you run into trouble or don't get things/need explanation, I'll help you.

PS: is the service you've got for email at Microsoft called 'Windows Live Admin center' (MS 'equivalent' of Google Apps, with Hotmail)? If that's the case it may well be a service separated from your Hosting service. In that case you can simply transfer the domain to Hostmonster (cancel it at MS) and set Hostmonster up to use Windows Live Admin Center (change MX as discribed in Admin Center), and everything will still be the way it was (except you don't have the great really 'free' Gmail and the other Apps services).

Josh

[lineofbirds]

Thank you Josh!
I've been trying to get this figured out for a while now, and it was easy! I knew there had to be a way to use gmail's interface, but I expected it to be a tough job setting it up.
Now if only I can solve my other problem...

Kimberly

[jlm]

Hi Josh,

thanks very much for the exhaustive explanation. I need to do the same, but rather than using a hotmail account i have a godaddy account: they do provide POP access to hopefully that should not be a problem.

Where I am encountering problem is that when i accessed the google account i created - carol@domain.com (your 4th step), google is not letting me pop the email address, probably because it is the same as the google account i logged in (carol@domain.com as well).

Is there a workaround to this? Thanks

[vlaarjos]

Hy all, I updated the tuturial and I think it needs to be re-read now since a lot changed (security advice, faulty mail.domain.com setup instructions and a temporary email account in between the Hotmail and Apps account added).

Kimberly, what's your other problem?

jlm, I changed the tutorial as you pointed me to an 'error' in it (it will now solve your problem), thanks!

Josh

[jlm]

Hi Josh,

Thanks for the update! Really appreciated.

I will try this later on today and let you know the outcome.

Jack

[lineofbirds]

vlaarjos:
I've pretty much got it solved.
I was basically working backwards from the instructions you gave us, I was trying to transfer my Google hosted sites to HostMonster, also, instead of just setting up my HM sites with Google Apps.
It all went very smoothly though. I was worried that I would have to cancel my google accounts to transfer them, but those concerns proved to be unfounded. The only hitch was that it seemed to take forever for the registrars to complete the transfers, and getting my authorization code from enom was a pain in the neck.

Oh, one thing that wasn't quite clear:
Google gives a list of - lets say it was 6 - MX records to add/change, but HM's cPanel only shows 3 (maybe is was 4 - I'm pretty tired right now, and don't quite remember) after they are all added in. After the first set, I merely added the first three (or four) Google gave me, is that correct? All seems to be going well, but I would like to know if I should go back and add the others as well, even if they don't all show in the records.


Now about those custom URLs:
I may be acting impatient, but I am still seeing the mail.google.com/a/domain.com URLs in my browser, in spite of having HM support change the CNAME, and customizing the URL in Google Apps. My links work correctly as in "mail.mydomain.com" points to the email sign in page, but the address changes to the default Google address, as soon as the site loads. >:P

Thanks again for the informative post and all of your helpful tips!
Kimberly

[vlaarjos]

Kimberly,

Google Apps MX instructions for cPanel (select from dropdown menu) are to change the primary MX to aspmx.l.google.com. They don't say anything about the secondary MX entries they talk about on the main page (strange). Fact is you'll probably want those secondary MX entries as well. (HM's) cPanel supports only 1 MX setting per priority, but Apps tells you to add multiple MX entries with the same priority (that's why they don't all show up in your cPanel records, you changed the MX for a particular priority while thinking that would add another MX entry with that priority). I think using a different priority than Apps tells you to use should also work. You should add at least the primary MX as the highest priority and add as many of the additional MX-records as you find sufficient (all with a different priority, but still in the order of inportance of the Google Apps instructions page).

About the URL, I don't know why it doesn't work. You seem to have done everything right. Maybe you should contact HM or Google about it. I'll start doing this soon so maybe I'll post again when I find out (if it doesn't work for me either).

Josh