There are many reasons why you might want to transfer your existing email address to another provider: Better pricing options or email deliverability, improved server performance, better privacy or perhaps you’re simply looking for modern features your current email provider does not offer.
Whatever your reasons may be, the process to transfer your email address consist of three simple steps:
3 Simple Steps to Transfer Your Email Address to Another Provider:
- Step 01: Create your new email account
- Step 02: Transfer your email data
- Step 03: Disable / delete your old email address
For further questions, have a look at the FAQs at the end of this page!
Video-Tutorial:
✅ Good to know: With this tutorial, you can keep your current email address or change your email address to another name.
Useful Tutorials & Further Reading:
Step 01:
Create Your New Email Account
First things first: Before you start to transfer your existing email address to another provider, you need to sign up with your new email hosting company and create a new email address. This new email address will be used to transfer your existing email address to your new email provider.
How to Keep Your Existing Email Address
Wait a minute! You just created a new email address. But actually, you’d like to transfer your existing address, not create a new one, right? To transfer your email address to your new provider, you first need to create a new address with your new provider. You can’t simply “drop them your existing account”, you first have to create a new email address and then transfer your email data to this new mailbox.
How to Manage Domain Names
When moving to a new email provider, you have two options:
- You can create a new email address using the domain name of your new hosting provider (e.g. example@gmail.com). By doing so, your email address will change.
- Or you can register and use a custom domain instead of your providers domain (e.g. example@mydomain.com). If you already used the same custom domain for your old provider, your email address will stay the same!
Sounds confusing? Here’s an overview:
| Current Email Address | New Email Address | Email Stays the Same? |
| ends with provider domain e.g. example@gmail.com |
ends with new provider domain e.g. example@mydomain.com | ❌ |
| ends with provider domain e.g. example@gmail.com |
ends with custom domain e.g. example@mydomain.com | ❌ |
|
ends with custom domain e.g. example@mydomain.com |
ends with new provider name e.g. example@yahoo.com | ❌ |
| ends with custom domain e.g. example@mydomain.com |
ends with custom domain e.g. example@mydomain.com | ✅ |
➡️ This means that you can only use the exact same email address you used before if your old email address already ended with a custom domain name. In all other cases, your email address is going to change.
Step 02:
Transfer Your Email Data
After creating your new email account, you’ll receive the access data from your new provider. Your new access data consists of:
- your username (usually your email address)
- your new email password
- the mail server address of your new provider
➡️ Make sure to also have the credentials (username, password, mail server address) of your old email account at hand!
With these two sets of credentials (one for the old, one for the new account), you can now start to transfer your email data to your new provider:
- Download and install the MailJerry app or start the email migration in your browser at https://webapp.mailjerry.com.
- Click on “New Migration”.
- Select the account type of your existing email address (Gmail, Office 365, Yahoo! etc.) If unsure, select IMAP. Now enter the username, password and mail server address of your old email account into the fields for “Existing Address”.
- In the section “New Address”, select the account type of your new provider (again, use IMAP if unsure) and enter the username, password and mail server address of your new email address.
- Click on “Check Settings”. MailJerry will validate your access data and connect with your old and new email address. Once a connection to both email addresses is established, you will be forwarded to the summary.
- On the summary, you’ll see how many emails and folders will be transferred to your new provider. On this page, enable the option “Synchronize Emails for 10 Days”.
➡️ Why should I enable the sync? After completing the initial email migration, it’s very likely that you’ll still receive emails in your old account. The auto sync will regularly check your old email account for new emails and automatically move them to your new provider.
- If everything looks good, click on “Start your Migration” and wait until all your email data was transferred to your new provider.
Step 03:
Disable / delete your old email address
Once your email migration has finished, it will be marked with a green icon in the overview. This means that your email transfer is done. To have a look at the migration details, simply click on the entry. On the details page, you’ll se exactly how many emails were migrated, which folders were created and much more!
So, time to delete your old email address? Not quite! First, it’s time for some …
Finishing Touches:
Before deleting your old email address, check if any of the following steps apply for you:
- Setup your new email address in your email client (Outlook, Thunderbird, Apple Mail…).
- Remove the old email address from your email client.
- Update your email signature with your new email address in case your email address changed.
- Again, in case your address changed: Inform your contacts and tell them your new email address.
Keep your Accounts Synced:
In case you don’t want to delete your old email account, you can simply enable MailJerry’s backup mode. The backup mode runs in a weekly, daily or monthly interval and will automatically migrate emails received in your old account to your new email provider. Opposed to the auto sync, which runs 10 days and then stops, you can use the backup mode for an indefinite amount of time!
Delete / Disable Your Old Email Address:
As soon as you don’t need your old email address any more, contact your old provider and ask them to delete your account. No reason to leave your old data lying around on some servers you don’t use anymore, right? 😉
FAQ:
Transfer Email Address to Another Provider
I’d like to use the same email address with the same custom domain. Is this possible?
Absolutely! If you’d like to transfer your email address to another provider while keeping the same custom domain, have a look at this tutorial or for a complete walkthrough, read this tutorial.
I’m using a custom domain name. When’s the best time to change the domain settings?
This actually depends on your use case. Have a look at our Same Domain Migration DNS & MX Update Guide to find the perfect solution!
My email address currently ends with my old providers domain name (e.g. @gmail.com). Can I keep this address?
Unfortunately, no. If you use your old providers domain name in your email address, you can’t take it with you, as the old provider won’t allow it. You can check with your new provider if the part before the @ sign is available, but the domain name will definitely change (e.g. example@gmail.com turns into example@yahoo.com).
Should I delete my email address right after moving to the new email provider?
In most cases, it’s best to keep your old account active for a few months or until you don’t receive any new emails in the old mailbox. If your email address changed because of the provider switch, make also sure that you don’t use your old email address as recovery email for any other online services. As soon as you’re sure that you definitely won’t need to log into your old account anymore, you can safely delete it.
