Using the Email Migration Tool for PBE and Hosted Exchange

Migrating your email from your server to Liquid Web’s Premium Business Email is made easy with our free self-service migration tool. From your browser, navigate to https://liquidweb.selfmigration.com and follow the instructions below. If your migration seems to be taking longer than expected, please see the troubleshooting section of this article.

Migrate Your Email

1. When you open the website for self migration, enter your email in the Migrate section, agree to the terms and click Login.
   
2. An email will be sent to you with a link to begin the migration. Once you click the link, you will be directed to the self-service migration tool.
   
3. To enter your server information, click the Next button from the home page of the migration tool.
4. The Source Server is the server you are migrating your email from, choose from the drop-down menu to select the type of email client you are migrating from.
   
5. After you choose the source server, enter the hostname and port. (993 for IMAP).
6. The Destination Server is your Premium Business Email server that you are migrating to, choose from the drop-down menu to select the type of email client you are migrating to.
   
7. Click Next after entering your server information, the tool will begin gathering your mailbox information.

   Note:

   The self-migration tool will only migrate your emails, contacts and calendars are not included in the migration.

   

8. The next page will request the mailbox information you are migrating. You can migrate up to 50 mailboxes. In the spreadsheet, enter the source email, login name, and password as well as the destination email, login name and password.

   Warning:

   Your destination mailboxes must be created prior to migration. See our articles Adding Multiple Mailboxes in Premium Business Email and Hosted Exchange.
9. After you enter the mailbox information to migrate, click Next and the migration tool will perform a trial migration to verify that the mailboxes are configured properly. Click Next to begin the trial migration.

   Note:

   You can close the browser window while this is being performed. The amount of time it will take depends on the number of mailboxes you are migrating and number of emails contained in them.
10. Once the trial migration is complete, a success message will show and you can proceed to the next page.
    
11. Once the trial migration completes successfully, you can now start the migration process, click Next to migrate your mailbox(es).
    
12. When the migration begins, you will be able to see the progress in the Status section. You can navigate away from this page during the process as it could take some time depending on the number of mailboxes and amount of data in them before your migration is complete.
    

Troubleshooting Migration Issues

The number one cause of an email migration taking an excessive amount of time is the size of the migration. Migration of mailboxes that are between 350MB and 1.5GB can take up to an hour, and groups of mailboxes can take even longer. When you migrate, it should be done outside of business hours when incoming and outgoing emails are slower.

There are additional factors that can slow down the migration process, the most common are:

• Simultaneous mailbox migrations: The self-service migration tool uses MigrationWiz, this tool reaches over 1.5GB per hour per mailbox when connecting to high availability infrastructures. Migrating more mailboxes at the same time allows parallel processing and can reduce the duration of your migration.
• Network speed: The network speed at both the source and destination servers is a factor in the speed of your migration. The slower the network speed, the slower your migration.
• Network latency: Network latency depends on the quality of the connection between the source and destination servers.
• The number of mailbox items: Mailboxes containing large amounts of messages and attachments will take longer to migrate. The source and destination servers talk to each other to introduce each message, so a mailbox with several messages will have more network chatter than a mailbox with one large message.
  Note:

  Prior to migration, make sure your users go through their messages and delete any non-essential email items that they will not need. This will help speed up your migration.

• Mailbox size: The volume of data in a mailbox can affect the length of your migration, the number of items in a mailbox has a much greater impact on the duration.
• Mailbox errors: Errors can occur for many reasons, including corrupt items and network outages. MigrationWiz contains automated self-healing technology that can automatically manage errors for you in most cases.