Office storage upgrade and Kerio migration

[Big Jim]

Client has contacted me with the following setup

Mac Mini Server (2012) running Kerio for email hosting
also acts as a file server for ~1TB of files.

backs up to a G raid thunderbolt drive and also a nightly backup to cloud.

Their current service provider has advised upgrading the mac mini as it no longer supports the latest version of teamviewer, however it won't run kerio any more and has suggested migrating to M365 for the hosted emails.
Cloud backup is handled by the other company to the tune of £40 per month.



Customer wants to upgrade the equipment, the G Raid drive is making some noise and the mac mini is obviously 10 years old now.

My suggestion would be to move to a synology and migrate the mails to M365, then they would no longer need the other company.
My questions are

1 - How does one go about migrating kerio to M365

2 - which is the best cloud backup service to use with a synology ?



If it helps at all they already have an O365 subscription, but i don't think this can be integrated to be used as a cloud backup can it ?

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Yeah I'd get M365 Business Premium, move their email up there, and move their TB of files to Teams/Sharepoint. Skip the old school NAS.
Lots of ways to migrate the email it supports IMAP, so migration tools can pull from it, and push up to 365.

 

[Big Jim]

I think the customer might still want a NAS, I'll look at sharepoint.

Can you give me a bit more info on the kerio migration.

I have never migrated anyone's email before, I assume the domain will need to be moved to M365 somehow ?
Then what ?

 

[HCHTech]

How many users? If the count is small, you could just export PSTs from their individual mail clients and import them back once the client is talking to M365...

We use B2 for cloud backup for our Synology setups. Works ok as long as you don't have a ton of data...say 4TB or less, something like that seems reasonable.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

The method we use to migrate depends on the client.
For really small clients, just a handful of users, with simple email setups, I'll often use the built in migration tool that 365 has, you can have it import from a POP or IMAP client.

For larger clients with many users and a more complex setup, I'll use a migration tool, such as BitTitan, or Skykick. It's basically a web portal with 2x halves to it. On the left side is your "source server" with users and credentials, and on the right side is you "destination server"...users/credentials. The migration tool can "pull" from the source server and "push" to the destination server.
What I like about this is, I can do a few pre-migration sweeps...get historical email all the way up to the past month. For larger clients with lots of users and mailboxes this is a nice feature. And then "cutover weekend"..I'll do a full pass. For the following week, I'll do a few "delta passes"...get those straggler emails that still end up landing in the old mail server due to coming from sources with slow/stale DNS records.

Speaking of DNS, yes you need to get access to the clients DNS control panel for the domain. So you can "prep" the 365 tenant with the clients domain, pre-load all the other DNS records that 365 needs. It's good to get in here at week ahead of time and reel in those TTLs....I like to bring them down to 15 minutes, makes cutover go quicker. And then for "cutover night"..flip the MX record, SPF, and autodiscover...create the DKIM, DMARC, and away you go!...within the next hour email destined for them should land in 365. Reconfigure the clients email clients....and done!

Always good to look at the clients current email system and see what they need to save, some weird email systems may have oddball contact lists, etc...that aren't standard and wont come over with migration tools. Also look at any "groups" they have, distie groups, shared calendars, shared contacts, aliases to mailboxes, retired mailboxes, etc etc. Sometimes getting those additional things can take longer than the actual mailbox moves themselves.

 

[Big Jim]

2 users, 3 or 4 machines at a guess. (all Macs)

The bit I am not knowledgeable on is how we get the domain switched over from whoever it is hosted with now to M365 so that he keeps the domain/email addresses that he has now.

His current provider says this
“From what I remember when I was there, Kerio isn’t an installed app, it runs via the web browser. Kerio is in the cloud, but the Mac Mini is configured as a caching server, I think. We’ve never logged into Kerio as we’ve never had the account credentials for it. Looking back in previous iterations of the documents we have; we never had the account for Kerio.”

I don't have the credentials for teamviewer for the mac mini yet so haven't had a chance to have a poke around it up to now.

 

[nlinecomputers]

It sounds like webmail. Which HAS to have creds. They just had the browser Safari or Chrome to remember the passwords. You'll have to dig into that and retrieve them.

Once you have that done you just have to log into the domain name provider (ex: Godaddy) and change the MX records and add a few records. The add domain name wizard in Microsoft 365 will walk you through all the steps and if it is GoDaddy will even do it for you. You pick a weekend to do the flip-over. You run the wizard for the domain changes and then run the wizard for the migration of email. Then you show up on-site at the client on Monday morning to reconfigure/set up Outlook to point at the new M365 servers. Easy peasy

 

[Big Jim]

so he has some email accounts configured as kerio.xxxx.com and they show all of his emails.

and on another machine he has imap.xxxx.com and they show around a month of emails

at least that is what he tells me.

 

[Big Jim]

been back on site today to try and figure this mess out.
What I have ascertained.
The mac mini is actually a 2014 machine running high sierra,
it is running a backup software that runs a regular offsite and onsite backup
I cannot find kerio installed anywhere on it. there is a link on the desktop that takes you to localhost:4040, I had to install chrome to access the login page (for kerio) but the only credentials the client has don't work.

He is going to find out who is hosting his mail for his domain, and I am trying to investigate how this kerio cache server works.

If I ping the kerio.domain.com it attempts to ping his IP so it must be hosted on the mac somehow but I don't know where or how to access it.

The current company he is using is called Jigsaw he says they used to be called something else and they are now saying they have never accessed the kerio cache server or set it up, but he is fairly sure they set this up for him, as he definitely didn't do it himself and hasn't used anyone else.

There are several other issues on site that I won't go into here, but he has managed to get a word document from Jigsaw with all of his details on there but not much pertaining to kerio



Given the above I was suggested dragging all of his emails (in an email client like outlook) over to an archive file (20 years worth, 10s of thousands apparently) and then migrating his web hosted emails to M365, then either copying his emails back or leaving them in an archive file.
Would this work ?

 

[nlinecomputers]

Sound like a dead end. Sounds like the mac at one time WAS his email server and is no longer. So Kerio has nothing to do with this anymore. The client is mixing up his recollection of what is being used. Are they able to view email now? What program EXACTLY is being used on the client side for this? Look at the settings and that will give you your answers.

 

[Big Jim]

Sound like a dead end. Sounds like the mac at one time WAS his email server and is no longer. So Kerio has nothing to do with this anymore. The client is mixing up his recollection of what is being used. Are they able to view email now? What program EXACTLY is being used on the client side for this? Look at the settings and that will give you your answers.

So to be clear.
He accesses his mail on several macs (macbook, imac etc) I think he uses the built in mail app in MacOS.

If he uses imap.XXXXX.com he can see about a months worth of mails on average
is he uses kerio.XXXX.com he can see all 20 years worth.

so the kerio server just seems to be caching his mails.
his webhost is Readyhost, have just tried to login to cpanel and it gives a page not found error, but webmail is working.


given this info then should I just archive his old emails that are cached in kerio through an outlook client, then copy them back to the original email once the migration is completed ?
Would the migration from readyhost to Microsoft also copy his caching settings, or is that something that is likely setup in kerio (ie kerio deletes mail older than 30 days off the main webhost server and stores the copy locally ?)

 

[nlinecomputers]

Kerio is obviously being used as a CLIENT to the mail server . Probably pops the email down from the real email server. If you can get a PC running outlook to access it then you can save the stack as PST files .

None of the settings on readyhost is going refer to Kiero. Kiero is just a client no different from Outlook, Thunderbird, or MacMail.

20 years of emails is ridiculous and no one needs to keep that. You should really discuss purging that to a realistic timeline such as 2years.

 

[Big Jim]

Kerio is obviously being used as a CLIENT to the mail server . Probably pops the email down from the real email server. If you can get a PC running outlook to access it then you can save the stack as PST files .

None of the settings on readyhost is going refer to Kiero. Kiero is just a client no different from Outlook, Thunderbird, or MacMail.

20 years of emails is ridiculous and no one needs to keep that. You should really discuss purging that to a realistic timeline such as 2years.

The Kerio is a caching server (which I have never heard of before in fairness), his mailboxes are limited to 500mb each with a paywall/subscripton fee for storage upgrades.

I assume how the "kerio server" works is that it acts as a client to retrieve the mails then acts a server so that his desktops can access the mail.

What you are suggesting is exactly how I would like to handle this, ie archive older than say 2/3 years, and move the balance to host M365.


no one needs 20 years of emails, except our customers, they have to have everything saved.

 

[Big Jim]

Finally started on this job last week.
email migration has been interesting, I tried to do it all with the customer's mac machines but Outlook for Mac seems to have very weird behaviour.
For example.
in Outlook on a windows machine, when I archive emails I can select a bunch of emails and archive them and it will create an archive file and move the emails to the archive, deleting the originals.
In Mac, I don't appear to have the ability to select which emails to archive , it just seems to select every email on the system (multiple email addresses) and it also leaves the original emails in place as well.

I have circumnavigated this by setting up a new user account and only having one email address configured at a time when creating the archive files. I have definitely had to use a windows machine to do the copying of emails over to the new webhost in outlook

One thing that has me baffled though, the email address with the least amount of emails in it is creating the largest .olm file.

email 1 ~ 40,000 emails, olm = 20GB, 2 years worth copied to the new webhost = 7gb
email 2 ~ 30,000 emails, olm = 7gb, 2 years worth copied to the webhost = 3GB
email 3 ~ 2000 emails, olm = 18GB, 2nd attempt olm = 38GB, every email copied to the webhost = 350MB

I have checked subfolders and they are all very low in terms of no of emails/file size.

Mac os doesn't give you the granularity or control that you have with pst files in windows, so I can't do any proper analysis.
I just won't create an archive file for the 3rd email address with it taking up such a low amount of space on webhosting.