Email Crisis

October 25, 2007 4:07 PM

I've just been informed by my ISP, which hosts all of my client's sites and email, that the email servers are being switched tonight and tomorrow morning all my clients have to add new email accounts with new user names (but same email address.) In addition, the new accounts will not have any of the old emails....

Changing username and password details is small potatoes as long as the email address remains the same. However, not being able to access their old emails in the new account on the new server is. Furthermore, they can only access them for a few more days at a specific IP using the old settings for a few more days (and of course, none of the new emails are going there.) I need to know if there is any method of having email clients like Firefox, MacMail, and Outlook take what emails they have now in what will be their old accounts (IMAP) and make them accessible, at least locally, within their new accounts?

posted by juiceCake to computers & internet (10 comments total)

Wow. I would suggest changing your client's sites and emails to a provider that understands providing a decent level of service. If you are paying anything other than free, you are paying too much. I would probably no longer have a client if I asked them to do this with little/no notice.

That said, I know with Outlook and Thunderbird, you can just add both accounts to the client, and drag the folder from one account to the other.

But really, leave that host and don't look back.
posted by Geckwoistmeinauto at 4:12 PM on October 25, 2007

I'm sorry this doesn't answer your question at all, but I would mos definitely tell this ISP "If I'm being forced to make my own backup of all mail, and change all my mail clients, then I think I'll just point my users at $your_competition". Best of luck.
posted by These Premises Are Alarmed at 4:15 PM on October 25, 2007

Yes, I am pissed, and I will handle that, unfortunately, that isn't as urgent for now.
posted by juiceCake at 4:23 PM on October 25, 2007

Use an e-mail client like Thunderbird to get all of the email messages down to your hard drive, then sync them back to the new accounts.

Problem is that since you (seemingly) don't have access to the server-side storage of the e-mail, you'll have to ask each one of your account holders to do this (or get everyone's password and do it for them).
posted by yellowbkpk at 4:41 PM on October 25, 2007

Demand the backups.
posted by Netzapper at 5:13 PM on October 25, 2007

Do you by any chance have access to the users account information (name and password?)

Is this imap? If so, there are tools out there to do this. I actually did this for someone who was in a similar situation, but sadly, I seem to have removed the tools that I used, and the minor scripts that I created to help with it. The scripts were really minor; less than 10 minutes of work.

The tools were likely: imapcp or up-imapproxy - google should be able to find source.

Seriously, the people you're working with are fuckers. But since the old accounts are accessable, if you don't want to do this for the users (and I don't think you have time for a lot of users), it's not too hard to download all of the mail locally form the old account.
posted by nobeagle at 6:06 PM on October 25, 2007

Wow - It's like Deja Vu all over again.
posted by jferg at 7:40 PM on October 25, 2007

Thanks everyone. Fortunately most of them were on POP accounts and it was relatively easy to convert. About three of them had to be manually converted and email copied from the previous old account.
posted by juiceCake at 6:29 AM on October 26, 2007

I see you've already got everything copied over... but for future dilemmas I have to say imapsync is a beautiful thing... :)
posted by vitrum at 5:11 PM on October 26, 2007

I have the same problem with the same ISP provider I think. I set up a rule in Outlook to responf to all emails through that account with a message telling people to update contact info to my other address. Also I have outlook setup to reply to all emails with my other address and all emails be responded to my other address.
posted by 4Lnqvv at 9:45 AM on October 27, 2007