E-mail importeren & migration

If you have requested a transfer of your domain, you will of course want to migrate your email with it. If your mail was hosted together with the website, you can import it with our Mail Import tool. For this you need to know the following things:

  • The IP address of the (old) mail server.
  • The login information of your email address(es).

IP Address of the old mail server

To migrate the mail, you need to know where the (old) mail currently resides. If your previous hosting party uses IMAP settings that do not include your domain name, then you can use them to import the mail. Otherwise, you will have to lookup the IP address of the mail server. When in doubt, you can always use the IP address.

Through the website https://viewdns.info/iphistory/ you can find out what the IP address was of the server where your (old) mail resides. In our example below, the new server is 45.82.191.198 and the old IP address was 91.184.0.22. Have you not changed the MX records of the domain yet? Then you should use the IP address most recently seen.

ViewDNS: History (EN).png

Note: The above IP addresses are examples, please replace them with the IP addresses associated with your domain. Domains at the same web hosting party may have different IP addresses.

IMAP Mailbox Import to Cloud86

  1. Login to Plesk: Control Panel (see: Plesk: Login and 2FA)
  2. In Plesk, go to Websites & Domains and find the domain where you want to import mail. At the domain, under the Mail tab, click Import Mail.
  3. In the next window, click Import Mail Messages and specify where and what data from your (old) mail server should be retrieved. Click Show Advanced Options to see all the options you need.
    • Email address (source): enter the email address you want to migrate email from here.
    • Password (source): enter the password of the old email address here.
    • Email (destination): this is the email address you want to move all email to. You can use an e-mail address you have already created in the Plesk Control Panel or you can have a new email address created directly. In the latter case, you also specify a new password right away.
    • IMAP host (source): here we are going to use the IP address of the old provider where your email was stored. This is 92.184.0.22 in our example and we obtained it from https://viewdns.info/iphistory/ (see section above).
  4. Click OK to start the mail import

Sync IMAP Mailbox after import (optional)

It is possible to import/sync all your email now and do it again later after your domain is actually transferred. This way you can be sure you haven't missed any email. To do this go to import screen (step 3 from above) and click on Re-sync to then retrieve the mail again from the old mail server.


If you need some help, you can always reach our support desk by email support@cloud86.io and on weekdays from 10:00 am to 4:00 pm you can also reach us by phone and via the chat in My Cloud86.