Server Migration / Email issues

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Posted by g4p, 10-08-2008, 07:31 AM
I'm moving some clients from a plesk VPS (7.0.4) to a WHM/Cpanel VPS (WHM 11.23.2 cPanel 11.23.4) We use mail.ourdomain.net for the mailservers and this is currently pointed to the Plesk VPS. I'm a little concerend that if the client starts picking up mail from the new box while the odd piece is still going through to the old one then there will be some messages missed. Is there any way of getting the Cpanel box to pick up messages from the Plesk box via POP3? Or is there another way to avoid this issue? The idea would be to first set up the mailboxes/accounts on the Cpanel box, have it pick up mail from the Plesk box (via IP address), then point mail.ourdomain.net to the Cpanel box then one by one move the domains over - hopefully giving the clients a seamless move. Many thanks. Richard Last edited by g4p; 10-08-2008 at 07:35 AM.
Posted by cPanelDavidG, 10-08-2008, 11:38 AM
Typically in any server transfer involving cPanel as a destination server, you migrate the account first then update the DNS accordingly for that individual site. This does not typically cause issues with email, with possible exception of POP3 users who leave mail on the server seeing those messages as new rather than already read. Is mail.example.com (substituting example.com for your domain) a Plesk account onto itself or do all of your Plesk accounts use that for their mail? Just in case you're not aware, cPanel does have a free transfer assistance hotline for those migrating to cPanel.
Posted by g4p, 10-08-2008, 03:00 PM
All the accounts on the plesk server can use any domain hosted on it to access their mail (i.e mail.theirdomain.com, www.theirdomain.com, www.ourdomain.net, mail.ourdomain.net etc). Mostly they use mail.ourdomain.net though. A mail.whatever.tld is set up automatically with all accounts and mail.ourdomain.net is just one of those subdomains. ourdomain.net is a standard hosting on the account like all others. The problem is that if a message is sent from the mailserver which still has the older DNS/MX records cached then that mail will be picked up by the plesk server. If they then download their mail from mail.ourdomain.net (which would now be pointing at the new server) then they will miss that message. At the same time if someone is on holiday for example and downloads their mail from mail.ourdomain.net (now at new server) then any mail which was picked up by the plesk server would also be lost. If there was a way of downloading the email via pop3 (like an exchange server for example) then it'd get around this. The other alternitive would be if we could download the mailbox files from the plesk server and then upload them to the Cpanel box. As an aside, it's fantastic to have someone 'offical' answer the question! I'm a fan of cPanel and have all my own boxes running cPanel. This is just on behalf of a design company I do the tech for too. I've been badgering them to migrate to cPanel for a while now so need it to go right!
Posted by cPanelDavidG, 10-08-2008, 03:10 PM
I understand now. cPanel/WHM does support this as well, it's just something we don't draw attention to in our current documentation. My understanding is that Plesk uses the maildir format of storing mail as well, so that would likely be possible. I recommend submitting a support ticket directly to cPanel so the technical analysts can assist you with doing this: http://tickets.cPanel.net/submit

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