How to let customers "sync" an old IMAP account with their new cpanel email account?

electric

Well-Known Member
Nov 5, 2001
790
11
318
Hello,

We often get customers who are transferring from another hosting provider. This is simple when the old host uses cpanel, but is a completely manual process if the old host uses a different platform.

We would like to allow customers to "sync" their own email accounts off their old server. Is this possible?

For example, something like this:

1. Customer logs into cpanel and creates their new email account.
2. Customer clicks "synchronize email account" and gets a page where they can:
3. Enter their OLD email account hostname, un and password.
4. Click "synchronize now" button and the system goes and gets a copy of all folders and emails off the old mail server (using IMAP) and puts them onto their new cpanel email account.

This would greatly simplify our lives, and allow much better customer service for those new customers who did not previous use cpanel.

Thanks!
 

dalem

Well-Known Member
PartnerNOC
Oct 24, 2003
2,983
159
368
SLC
cPanel Access Level
DataCenter Provider
I think that should be posted in the feature requests
but pretty easy if there old host is using mailDIR
just copy the folder over
 

electric

Well-Known Member
Nov 5, 2001
790
11
318
The idea here is that the customer's should be able to transfer/sync over their old email without needing to become knowledgeable with mail server administration.

99.99% of our customers would have no idea what "maldir" means. However, if you told them to input their old mail server hostname, username and password, and then click a "go" button, they would have no problem.
 

storminternet

Well-Known Member
Nov 2, 2011
460
0
66
cPanel Access Level
Root Administrator
I have little doubt that emails can be synced from different mailserver platform to cPanel. This is because the different structure of mail folders used by different different mail servers. But if cPanel is able to provide tool to sync the emails from different mail platforms then I think it would be great benefit for all of us. It will not just help us to sync the emails but also save our time for the manual migration.
 

cPanelMichael

Administrator
Staff member
Apr 11, 2011
47,880
2,258
463
Hello :)

There are no native tools that will allow individual users to sync email data from other IMAP servers at this time. The current advice is generally to use the "imapsync" utility, but this might be a bit too complicated for an average user, as you mentioned. Please submit your idea as a feature request via:

Submit A Feature Request

Thank you.