Reverting e-mail from bespoke DNS records to standard Plusnet IMAP - Will I lose my old messages?

[#1]

Plusnet hosts a bespoke domain name for me and for some years I've diverted the e-mail over to Microsoft (Hotmail / Outlook.com) by setting additional DNS records. I've now got quite a collection of folders and old e-mails all of which I need to keep. I'd now like to revert to the standard PlusNet IMAP configuration for this e-mail account. This looks straight forward to do but my question is will I lose all my old mail folders when the change is made?

[#2]

Not sure I fully understand the question.

If the folders/emails are hosted in your Hotmail/Outlook account, then we have no control over them, and you would need to double check with Microsoft (although I suspect you'd be OK).

If the folders/emails are hosted in your Plusnet IMAP account, then they will all remain intact.

[#3]

Thanks for coming back to me on this. So to clarify... I have a Plusnet account with the standard e-mail / web space and a bespoke domain name that PlusNet hosts. For this domain, In the Domain Names page, I selected "E-mail Settings" to "Other", "Domain Hosting Settings" to "Other" and then provided "Additional DNS records" to route everything to the Microsoft HotMail / Outlook.com cloud. I now propose to revert to "E-Mail Settings" of "POP3" (which I assume will also let me configure IMAP) and "Domain Hosting Settings" to "Default". In the current configuration I don't really know if my mail folders reside with Microsoft or PlusNet and I don't know what happens if I make the proposed change. I have most, if not all, my folders incarnated on my desktop mail client but I really need to ensure that they end up available anywhere via IMAP. Thoughts gratefully received.

[#4 · Accepted solution]

Looking at your MX records, they don't go anywhere near our systems, so aside from handling the DNS lookup we currently have nothing to do with your email delivery.

That means all of your folders/mail collection/IMAP access is currently the responsibility of Microsoft/Hotmail, and it's their servers doing all the work.

If you made the changes you propose, then mail would stop being delivered to the mailbox/folders where it's getting sent now, and start getting delivered to your Plusnet mailbox instead.

If you're using a standalone email client, it would need reconfiguring to collect email from the Plusnet account instead of/as well as the Hotmail account. I presume the folders etc. that you currently access would remain as long as you continue to poll the Hotmail account. I can't be 100% sure though, because as mentioned, we have no visibility nor responsibility over your Hotmail account.

For peace of mind, you could set up  your mail client to access the Plusnet account alongside the MS one and copy all of the old folders/mail across before you make any changes. Many email clients such as Thunderbird will allow you to do this. You need to be careful though because we only typically allow you to store up to 1GB of mail across all of your mailboxes.

[#5]

Thanks, this is tremendously useful. Based on what you've suggested, as a belt and braces solution I'll do the following: - Ensure that my desktop Outlook client is fully synched with the old account and then take a backup. - Remove the old account from automatic send / receive. This just in case the redirect causes some kind of "sync to empty" at the Microsoft end. - Set up a new account with the PlusNet IMAP credentials - Do the DNS redirect via the PlusNet website - Manually copy over folders from the old account. This is less than 1Gb so no issue with storage limits. - Delete the old account after a bit of parallel running

[#6]

Sounds like a plan