Moving business email to your own domain: a step-by-step checklist

Email on your own domain looks more professional, keeps addresses under your organisation’s control and makes it easier to change providers later. A careful migration avoids lost messages and delivery problems.

1. Take an inventory

• Every mailbox and its current size.
• Aliases, distribution lists and shared mailboxes.
• Devices and applications that send mail — printers, scanners and websites with contact forms.

2. Prepare the domain and the new service

Make sure you control the domain’s DNS. A few days before the move, lower the TTL on the MX record so the switch takes effect quickly. Then create the mailboxes on the new service — for example email hosting on MavenHost (opens in a new tab).

3. Copy existing mail

Use an IMAP synchronisation tool or the provider’s import feature to copy mail, folders and contacts. Run a first full copy before the switch and a final incremental copy afterwards.

4. Switch the MX records

Update the MX records to the new provider’s mail servers. Keep the old service active for at least a few days, because some senders will still deliver to it until DNS changes reach them.

5. Authenticate your mail

Receiving servers increasingly reject or flag mail that is not authenticated. Publish three DNS records:

• SPF — lists the servers allowed to send mail for your domain.
• DKIM — adds a cryptographic signature that proves messages were not altered.
• DMARC — tells receivers what to do with mail that fails SPF or DKIM and where to send reports. Start with a monitoring policy (p=none), then tighten it once reports look clean.

6. Reconnect users and devices

Update phones and desktop mail clients, then reconfigure printers, scanners and website forms to send through the new service. Send test messages to external addresses and check they arrive with authentication passing.

Want the migration handled for you? See cloud, hosting and email services.