Questions people ask before moving their email

No. We only ever read from your old mailbox — we copy messages out, we never delete, move or reorganise anything in it. When the migration finishes, your old mailbox still contains everything it did before, and you can go back to it at any time.

Yes. We copy each message whole, exactly as it was sent, so attachments travel inside it rather than being reattached. We then check the copy at the destination against the original — including a separate check over the attachments themselves, so a message that arrived with its attachment stripped is caught rather than counted as a success.

Your folder structure is recreated at the new provider and each message lands in the folder it came from. Gmail is the exception worth knowing about: Gmail uses labels rather than folders, and one message can carry several. Where that happens we keep one copy of the message rather than one per label, so your new mailbox does not gain duplicates your old one never had.

It is not lost, but it does not travel with the main move — we work from a list taken when the migration starts, so anything arriving afterwards is not on it. We run catch-up checks after the move (and again 24 and 72 hours later) that re-read your old mailbox and copy across anything new. Your completion report counts those messages separately so you can see exactly what happened to them.

You get a list of them, with the reason for each — usually a message too large for the new provider to accept, or one it rejects as malformed. Every one of those messages is still sitting in your old mailbox, untouched. The report separates what moved, what moved with a caveat, what did not move, and what we could not verify, and you can download the unmoved list as a spreadsheet.

If your addresses are on your own domain, usually yes — you keep the address and change the provider behind it. That is the harder kind of move, so we run it as a switch-over rather than a single cutover: your old provider stays live, your mail is copied across and verified, and you change your domain over when you are ready.

Your domain has a setting that decides which provider receives your email. Changing it is the switch, and it is the one step only you can do, because only you can sign in to wherever you bought your domain. We show you exactly where to find the setting and what to put in it, and your mail keeps working the whole time — nothing goes dark while you do it.

As long as you need. The first 30 days of switch-over care are included in the price. After that it becomes a monthly charge, because we are still running catch-up checks for you, and completing your switch stops it immediately. Nothing expires and nothing is deleted if you take longer.

Your mail is already copied and verified at the new provider, and your old mailbox still works — so nothing breaks. The switch-over care charge continues while we keep checking for new mail, and you can end it at any point by telling us you are done. If you stop the care without switching, we say so plainly on your report rather than quietly marking the migration complete.

We need to sign in to the mailbox we are copying from and the one we are copying to. A migration password is never written to our database: it is held in temporary storage and deleted automatically within hours of the move finishing. A Vault backup is different, and we will not pretend otherwise — a scheduled backup has to sign in on its own, so that password is stored encrypted, and disconnecting the mailbox deletes it immediately.

No. We move email. Calendars are not email — they are a different format with none of the identifying information we use to prove a message arrived intact, so we do not claim to move them. Most providers offer a calendar export and import for exactly this reason, and we will point you at the right one for your pair.

No, for the same reason as calendars. Contacts are not email and are not covered by the checks that let us tell you every message is accounted for. Exporting and importing them takes a couple of minutes at either provider, and we would rather say so than move them without being able to prove they arrived.

You get a report showing what moved, what differed and why, and — once nothing is unaccounted for — a certificate you can keep. We run catch-up checks for anything that arrived late, and the report stays available in your account afterwards. From there you can set your new mailbox up on your devices, and optionally keep an encrypted backup of the old one.

Yes. Vault keeps an encrypted copy of a mailbox on a daily or weekly schedule while you carry on using that mailbox exactly as before. You can restore a single message or a whole backup into a connected mailbox, and restored mail always lands in a new dated folder so it never overwrites what is already there.

A migration is priced per job, and the free check tells you your exact price before you pay anything. Switch-over care is included for the first 30 days where it applies. Vault is not billed yet — we have not published its pricing.