HCHTech
Well-Known Member
- Reaction score
- 3,828
- Location
- Pittsburgh, PA - USA
Ok, so a 3-person non-profit called the other day, they had just switched web hosters and needed help getting their email working again. Turns out their email works fine, but they need the historical email imported to the new accounts.
Person #1 used Outlook, so easy-peasy, export the email in the old profile to a PST, import that into the new profile. Done. Next!
Person #2 used the Windows 10 Mail app. They had Outlook on their machine, but didn't "like" it, so went with Windows Mail - Umm, OK. Do some digging, no luck finding old email. A little quality time with Google turned up this fun fact: When you setup an IMAP account in the Windows 10 Mail app, it doesn't actually download the mail! Ok, well, maybe we can access the account on the old web host and export the mail from there. Nope, account is closed. Sorry, all your email is gone. Pay the 'stupid' tax and move forward...but use Outlook this time for crying out loud.
Of course when queried about backups, I got a combination of the deer-in-the-headlights look and that look when your dog is trying to figure out what you're saying - they just stare at you and tilt their head to the side. Anyway, no backups.
Person #3 (who runs the non-profit) used Outlook, thank goodness, but had 30GB of email and about a hundred mail folders. We export everything to a PST, which takes it down to 20GB in size - still pretty big. I go to import it into the new profile, and hit a snag right away - many of those folders are subfolders of the Inbox, and the error message basically says the email server doesn't allow that with IMAP. We try a few things, including logging onto cpanel for the new hoster looking for some option to allow this - none was found.
I also tried forcing the root folder in the Outlook account to be 'INBOX', and while that rebuilt the folders, it still doesn't allow subfolders of the inbox to be created or imported.
Am I missing something here, or will I have to separately export those folders and them import them to a folder NOT under the inbox?
While waiting on the resolution of that, we proceed. Everything looks to be working, but user #3 reports that he isn't getting all of his email. After some discussion, it turns out he was previously getting a gmail account in Outlook as well. Ok, fine, I add the gmail account along with the standard warnings that you are probably not going to have a great experience with gmail in Outlook, but whatever you want, I guess.
Then he reports that this doesn't look like it did before. He wants all incoming messages to be in the same inbox folder. I do a quick check of his gmail account online and find he has 25,000 messages in his inbox. I am NOT keen on figuring out how to do what he wants because I don't think it's even going to work with that much data trying to sync via IMAP. I suppose I could leave the two accounts in Outlook, but make a rule that moves any new incoming mail to his gmail account to the inbox of the main account, but this is just kicking the can down the road - it's still going to end up not working or causing problems down the road because of the sheer volume of email in the IMAP sync. I could also set gmail to forward copies of all incoming mail to the main email account, but that has the same problem.
This is such a mess that I'm hesitant to push O365 as a potential solution. This is the result of bad practices plus an original setup that didn't contemplate the volume of email that would follow. I am planning on setting up archiving to reduce the amount of mail in the live accounts, but I'm sure they won't like that, either.
Person #1 used Outlook, so easy-peasy, export the email in the old profile to a PST, import that into the new profile. Done. Next!
Person #2 used the Windows 10 Mail app. They had Outlook on their machine, but didn't "like" it, so went with Windows Mail - Umm, OK. Do some digging, no luck finding old email. A little quality time with Google turned up this fun fact: When you setup an IMAP account in the Windows 10 Mail app, it doesn't actually download the mail! Ok, well, maybe we can access the account on the old web host and export the mail from there. Nope, account is closed. Sorry, all your email is gone. Pay the 'stupid' tax and move forward...but use Outlook this time for crying out loud.
Of course when queried about backups, I got a combination of the deer-in-the-headlights look and that look when your dog is trying to figure out what you're saying - they just stare at you and tilt their head to the side. Anyway, no backups.
Person #3 (who runs the non-profit) used Outlook, thank goodness, but had 30GB of email and about a hundred mail folders. We export everything to a PST, which takes it down to 20GB in size - still pretty big. I go to import it into the new profile, and hit a snag right away - many of those folders are subfolders of the Inbox, and the error message basically says the email server doesn't allow that with IMAP. We try a few things, including logging onto cpanel for the new hoster looking for some option to allow this - none was found.
I also tried forcing the root folder in the Outlook account to be 'INBOX', and while that rebuilt the folders, it still doesn't allow subfolders of the inbox to be created or imported.
Am I missing something here, or will I have to separately export those folders and them import them to a folder NOT under the inbox?
While waiting on the resolution of that, we proceed. Everything looks to be working, but user #3 reports that he isn't getting all of his email. After some discussion, it turns out he was previously getting a gmail account in Outlook as well. Ok, fine, I add the gmail account along with the standard warnings that you are probably not going to have a great experience with gmail in Outlook, but whatever you want, I guess.
Then he reports that this doesn't look like it did before. He wants all incoming messages to be in the same inbox folder. I do a quick check of his gmail account online and find he has 25,000 messages in his inbox. I am NOT keen on figuring out how to do what he wants because I don't think it's even going to work with that much data trying to sync via IMAP. I suppose I could leave the two accounts in Outlook, but make a rule that moves any new incoming mail to his gmail account to the inbox of the main account, but this is just kicking the can down the road - it's still going to end up not working or causing problems down the road because of the sheer volume of email in the IMAP sync. I could also set gmail to forward copies of all incoming mail to the main email account, but that has the same problem.
This is such a mess that I'm hesitant to push O365 as a potential solution. This is the result of bad practices plus an original setup that didn't contemplate the volume of email that would follow. I am planning on setting up archiving to reduce the amount of mail in the live accounts, but I'm sure they won't like that, either.
