Email Migration And Email Forwarding: Do You Know The Difference?
Imagine the following scenario: You’ve just graduated from college and have entered the workforce. Finally, it’s time for a real paycheck—congratulations! You’ve also been given a shiny new work email address. Neat, right? But there’s a problem…
You still receive emails you’re interested in to your old college email address, and you want to receive these same emails to your personal email instead. You could keep checking your college email, but no one wants to juggle three inboxes!
What’s the solution? There are two options here—email forwarding and email migration. But what’s the difference?
Email Forwarding
Email forwarding allows you to automatically resend all emails received from one inbox, to another inbox. In our example, you could set up email forwarding on your college email, and then any email you receive will automatically be forwarded to your personal email.
This is simple to set up in most email clients, and is the quickest solution for a temporary fix. You can find instructions for Gmail and Comcast here:
How to set up forwarding in Gmail
How to set up forwarding in Comcast
But why is this not ideal in the long term? Let’s jump back into our example. You’ve been at your new job for a few years now, and your emails from old classmates have all dried up. Nothing else is being forwarded of any value. It’s time to shut it down, but you don’t want to lose all your old love letters and gossip from your golden college years! How can you keep everything? Email migration time!
Email Migration
When the time has come to move from one email address to another permanently, email migration is the way forward. It allows you to transfer all of your emails, including any attachments, from one inbox to another. You also get all your contacts!
Whether your story is just like our example and you need to transfer a single inbox, or you’re a business owner looking to migrate thousands of inboxes, we’ve got a migration solution for you.
I want to migrate a single inbox
ShuttleCloud powers the migration process for the biggest email providers in the world, including Gmail and Comcast. You can migrate from any provider to another, or within the same provider. The steps for each provider will vary, but here are some instructions for the main ones:
Xfinity for Comcast migration instructions
I need migration services for my business
For large-scale migrations, ShuttleCloud offers two options. The best for you will depend on how you’re looking to offer this migration service to your customers/users.
1. Migration using the ShuttleCloud API
Technical jargon aside, using our API is basically a way for your users to access migration services from within your own platform. You’ll need your engineers to build some framework around this, but it offers you complete flexibility in how everything looks. For example, this is how we offer migration services to Gmail—we do the raw work in the background, and they make it look pretty and offer a seamless experience to their users.
2. Using a Shuttlecloud migration portal
If you want a ready-to-use solution with minimal engineering involvement on your side, a ShuttleCloud hosted portal is the way to go. Our team of engineers and designers will build a portal to your exact specifications, allowing you to offer your users the exact experience you have in mind. As you don’t need a lot of technical work on your side, it’ll free up your engineering team’s valuable time, while still delivering a customized solution. We’ve covered how we’ve designed and built these portals in detail here.
Which solution is best for me?
Whether you’re migrating your old college inbox, or need a powerful portal to move thousands of inboxes daily, Shuttlecloud is here to help. We’re here anytime to discuss your needs and find the best solution for you and your users—get in touch with us here to learn more!