Email migration services for Australian businesses, from any platform to any platform.
In short
What are email migration services?
- Any platform to any platform
- Cutover scheduled out of hours
- Calendars, permissions and delegation tested
- Sydney based, working Australia wide
Moving one or two mailboxes? You do not need a consult. Our fixed-price $249 email migration service covers a simple, single-platform move. Moving a whole team, with shared mailboxes and delegation? Keep reading, then use the form at the bottom of this page.
Buy the $249 serviceWhat a controlled email migration looks like
The difference between a clean move and a bad one is almost never the mail copy. It is everything around it: mail flow, DNS, permissions and the day after.
1000+
Mailboxes migrated
We have moved more than a thousand mailboxes, in both directions, between Google Workspace and Microsoft 365, off webmail and cPanel onto both, and from one webmail host to another. That matters because the direction of travel changes the work: pulling a team out of Microsoft 365 is a genuinely different job from pushing them into it, and plenty of providers only sell the one route they are comfortable with.
Ask anyone you are comparing whether they will migrate you away from a platform, not just onto it. The answer tells you whether you are buying a migration or a sales funnel.
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Copy, never move
The source mailboxes stay intact and readable until you sign off.
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Batch, do not big bang
Mailboxes migrate in waves so a problem hits one group, not everyone.
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Cut over out of hours
DNS changes land on an evening or a weekend, with TTLs lowered days ahead.
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Verify after go-live
Mail flow, calendars, delegation and deliverability are all tested after the switch.
What actually breaks in an email migration.
Copying mail from one server to another is the easy part. Any tool can do it, and most of them do it well. Migrations go wrong somewhere else entirely, and they usually go wrong quietly, so nobody notices until an invoice never arrives or a customer says they emailed you last week. These are the failure modes we plan against, because we have seen every one of them.
Mail flow gaps at cutover
For a period after the MX record changes, some sending servers still hold the old address in cache and deliver to a mailbox nobody is watching any more. If the old platform has already been switched off, that mail bounces or vanishes. The fix is preparation: lower the DNS TTL days in advance, keep the source platform live and accepting mail through the transition, and forward anything that lands there into the new mailbox.
Lost calendar permissions and shared mailboxes
Personal mailboxes move cleanly. Shared mailboxes, resource calendars and the permissions layered on top of them do not. The reception mailbox that three people can see, the boardroom calendar, the manager whose assistant books their meetings: these are configuration, not data, and a bulk copy tool does not carry them across. They have to be rebuilt on the target and tested by the people who use them.
Broken send-as and delegation
Send-as and send-on-behalf rights are the ones people notice on the first Monday. Someone tries to send from accounts@ or from their manager's address, the new platform refuses because the permission was never re-granted, and the message fails. Every one of these has to be inventoried before the move, not discovered after it.
Orphaned distribution lists and aliases
Distribution lists, groups and the aliases that quietly sit on top of real mailboxes are a common casualty. If info@ was an alias on a mailbox rather than a mailbox itself, and nobody wrote that down, it simply stops existing after the move. Mail to it bounces, and the bounce goes to the sender, not to you, so you may never find out.
DNS and autodiscover mistakes
The MX record is the obvious one. Autodiscover is the one that gets forgotten, and without it, Outlook and mobile clients cannot find the new server and prompt every user for settings they do not have. Old CNAME records pointing at a decommissioned host, a stale webmail A record, a TTL still set to 24 hours: each of these turns a scheduled cutover into an unscheduled week.
SPF, DKIM and DMARC breaking deliverability
This is the one that hurts the day after everything looked fine. Your mail now leaves from a different platform, but your SPF record still authorises only the old one, DKIM has not been re-published for the new tenant, and DMARC dutifully tells the world to distrust you. Mail starts landing in spam, and because it is your own outbound mail, nobody in your business sees it happen. Authentication records are part of the cutover, not a follow-up ticket.
Mobile devices that never re-authenticate
Every phone, tablet and desktop client is holding a credential that points at a server that no longer serves them. Some prompt for a new password, some fail silently and keep showing an inbox that stopped updating on Friday. Staff assume email has gone quiet. It has not: their device just stopped talking. This is why the first working day after go-live needs a human available, not a ticket queue.
Archives and PST files nobody mentioned
The mailbox in the admin console is rarely the whole story. There are local archives, PST files on desktops, an old shared drive full of exported mail and, on at least one machine, a decade of correspondence that exists nowhere else. Finding these before the migration is the difference between moving a business and moving a subset of it.
How we migrate without downtime.
Downtime in an email migration is not caused by the size of the mailboxes. It is caused by doing everything at once. Our approach is the opposite: run the two platforms alongside each other, move people in small groups, keep the source live, and make the actual switch the smallest, dullest event in the project. Here is the sequence.
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1
Audit and inventory
Days 1 to 3We connect to the source platform and write down what is really there: every mailbox and its size, every shared mailbox, every alias, every distribution list, every send-as and delegate permission, every forwarding rule, every calendar that more than one person relies on. We check what your DNS currently says and where your mail actually flows. Most migration disasters trace back to something that was never on the list, so the list is the job.
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2
Prepare the destination
Week 1The target tenant or server is built before a single message moves: domains verified, licences assigned, mailboxes and shared mailboxes created, groups rebuilt, permissions re-granted to match the inventory. At the same time we lower the TTL on your DNS records, so that when the cutover comes, the change propagates in minutes instead of hanging around for a day.
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3
Coexistence and the first bulk sync
Week 1 to 2We start copying mail while your team keeps working exactly as they are. Nothing is deleted at the source and nobody has to change anything. For larger or longer-running moves we set up coexistence so both platforms can route mail sensibly between each other during the transition, which means there is no cliff edge where one system must be off before the other can be on.
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4
Pilot batch
Before the main waveA small group goes first: ideally people who use email hard and will notice anything wrong, including at least one shared mailbox user and one person with delegate access. We watch what breaks for them, fix it, and only then roll the remaining mailboxes in batches. A problem found in a pilot is an adjustment. The same problem found at cutover is an outage.
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5
Cutover, out of hours
A scheduled evening or weekendMX records and autodiscover point at the new platform outside your working hours. Mail that senders despatch during the changeover is queued by their own servers and delivered when the new record resolves, so it is delayed by minutes rather than lost. The source platform stays up and keeps accepting mail, forwarding anything that still arrives there. Then a delta sync sweeps up everything that landed in the source mailboxes since the last copy.
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6
Verification and the first week
Go-live and the days afterWe send and receive test mail internally and externally, in both directions. We check that shared mailboxes open, that delegates can send, that calendars show the right availability and that resource bookings work. We confirm SPF, DKIM and DMARC are aligned and that your outbound mail is authenticating, because deliverability failures do not announce themselves. Then we stay available while people reconnect their phones and Outlook profiles, which is when the real questions arrive.
Timeframes above describe how the phases are sequenced, not a promise about your business. A five-person move and a two-hundred-mailbox move are different projects. You get a written timeline after the audit, and we do not begin until you have agreed to it.
What a managed email migration includes.
Deliverables, not adjectives. This is what you actually receive.
A written migration plan
The inventory of every mailbox, alias, group and permission, the platform pair, the batch order, the cutover window and the rollback position, agreed with you before anything moves.
Mail, folders, calendars and contacts
Messages and folder structure, calendars, contacts and, where the platform supports it, categories and rules. Your team signs in and finds what they expect to find.
Shared mailboxes and permissions rebuilt
Shared mailboxes, resource calendars, distribution lists, aliases, send-as and delegate rights recreated on the target and tested by the people who depend on them.
DNS, MX and autodiscover handled
TTLs lowered ahead of the window, MX and autodiscover records cut over out of hours, stale records for the old platform cleaned up rather than left to rot.
SPF, DKIM and DMARC configured
Authentication records updated for the new sending platform as part of the cutover, so your mail keeps landing in inboxes rather than quietly sliding into spam.
Cutover support and handover
A human available through the cutover window and the days after, plus plain-English reconnection instructions for phones and desktop Outlook so your team is not guessing.
Which platforms we move between.
Every pairing below works in both directions. Moving to a platform and moving off one are the same project seen from different ends, and the awkward part is rarely the platform you are heading for. It is the one you are leaving, and what it will and will not let you export.
Still deciding which platform to land on? Our comparison of Google Workspace vs Microsoft 365 covers the plans, the AI assistants and the total cost of ownership for Australian businesses, so you choose once rather than migrating twice.
Routes we have actually run
- Google Workspace to Microsoft 365
- Microsoft 365 to Google Workspace
- Webmail or cPanel to Microsoft 365
- Microsoft 365 to webmail or a new host
- Webmail or cPanel to Google Workspace
- Webmail to a different webmail host
The reverse routes are the telling ones. Most providers will happily move you onto the platform they resell, and quietly discover they cannot move you off it.
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Microsoft 365
The most common destination, and a common source. Exchange Online mailboxes, shared mailboxes, groups and calendars. If Microsoft 365 is where you are heading, our Microsoft 365 migration services page goes deeper on tenant setup, licensing and Exchange specifics.
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Google Workspace
To and from Google Workspace, formerly G Suite. The care is in labels, which do not map one to one onto Outlook folders, and in shared calendars and Drive links buried in old invitations.
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Exchange, on-premise and hosted
Retiring an ageing Exchange server, or moving off a hosted Exchange provider. Staged migration with coexistence for larger teams, a single planned cutover for smaller ones.
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cPanel, webmail and IMAP
The mailboxes that came free with your web hosting, and every generic IMAP or POP3 account. Usually the messiest source, because the mailbox list and the alias list rarely agree with each other.
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Zoho Mail
To and from Zoho, including the shared and group mailboxes teams accumulate on it. Aliases and forwarding rules are inventoried explicitly, because Zoho makes them easy to create and easy to forget.
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GoDaddy and Rackspace
Two of the most common providers Australian businesses are trying to leave. Both are migratable, and both need their own quirks in export limits and authentication planned for rather than discovered.
Not on the list? Tell us the source and the destination in the form below. If a platform can export its mail, it can be migrated, and if it makes that difficult, that is exactly the sort of job worth handing to someone who has done it before.
What an email migration costs.
Cost scales with three things, and none of them is how good the agency's website looks. It scales with the number of mailboxes, the volume of data inside them, and the platform pair, because some sources hand over their data willingly and some fight you for every gigabyte.
Mailbox count is the easy variable. Data volume is the one that stretches a timeline, since twenty mailboxes with a decade of archives each is a bigger job than fifty tidy ones. The platform pair is the one that decides how much of the work is manual: a supported, well-documented migration path is routine, while an old hosted webmail system with throttled IMAP access and no admin console is not. Complexity does the rest. Shared mailboxes, delegate permissions, distribution lists and coexistence requirements all add real hours, which is precisely why we will not publish a per-mailbox rate and then revise it once we see your setup.
The $249 email migration service
$249 AUD
Buy it from the store, no consult required. It suits a simple move: a small number of mailboxes, a common platform pair, no shared mailbox web to untangle and no coexistence period. If that is you, paying for a scoping call would be a waste of your money.
A managed migration for your team
Quoted after the audit
For a whole business moving at once, where the risk sits in mail flow, delegation, DNS and deliverability rather than in copying the mail. We audit first, quote in writing, and you approve the number before any work begins. No hourly surprises after the fact.
If you are between the two, tell us the mailbox count and the platforms in the form below and we will say honestly which route you need. Sending a small business to a scoped project it does not need is a good way to lose it forever.
Results we have engineered.
Real growth, measured against a baseline. Here is what compounding search, AEO and automation looks like for Australian businesses.
The challenge: Invisible for high-intent local searches, with new work arriving only through referrals.
- +312%
- Organic traffic
- #1
- For 40+ keywords
- 3.1x
- Qualified leads
The challenge: A strong offer that buyers simply never saw inside their AI research.
- Cited
- By ChatGPT & Perplexity
- +186%
- Branded search
- 2.4x
- Demo requests
The challenge: A slow storefront and manual workflows capping both traffic and team capacity.
- +248%
- Organic revenue
- 0.9s
- Largest paint (LCP)
- 15 hrs
- Saved weekly via automation
Results from individual client engagements, measured against each client's own baseline in Google Search Console and Google Analytics 4. Client names are withheld by agreement. Outcomes vary with market, competition, budget and starting point.
Email migration, answered
It depends on the number of mailboxes, how much data sits in them and how fast the source platform lets us read it. A single mailbox with a few gigabytes is usually a same-day job. A team of twenty with years of archives is a project measured in days, because the bulk copy runs in the background well before anyone changes over. We give you a written timeline after the audit, and we do not start until you have agreed to it.
Our method is built so that nothing is deleted at the source. We copy, we do not move. The old platform stays intact and readable until you are satisfied everything has landed, which means a mistake is recoverable rather than final. We also run a delta sync after the cutover to pick up anything that arrived in the source mailbox during the switch.
Yes. You keep your domain and every address on it. A migration changes the platform behind the address, not the address itself. Your team keeps name@yourbusiness.com.au and your customers see no difference. If you are also changing domain, we can run both in parallel and add the old domain as an alias so nothing bounces.
Yes. Mailboxes, folder structure, calendars, contacts, shared mailboxes, distribution lists and calendar permissions are all part of the scope. Calendars and delegate permissions are the parts most commonly missed by cheap migrations, so we test them explicitly before we call the job done.
The $249 service in our store is a fixed-price, self-serve purchase for a simple move: a small number of mailboxes, a straightforward platform pair and no complicated permissions or coexistence. A managed migration is a scoped project for a whole team, where the risk is in mail flow, shared mailboxes, delegation, DNS and deliverability rather than in copying the mail. If you are not sure which you need, send us the mailbox count and the platforms and we will tell you honestly.
Cost scales with three things: how many mailboxes you are moving, how much data is in them and which platform pair is involved. A single simple mailbox is covered by our fixed-price $249 service. Anything larger is scoped after a short audit, and you get a written quote before any work starts. We do not quote a per-mailbox rate blind, because the mailbox count alone does not tell you whether the job is easy or awkward.
The bulk of the data copies across while your team keeps using the old system as normal, so the working day is untouched. The only sensitive moment is the DNS cutover, which we schedule out of hours. Mail sent during the changeover is queued by the sending server and delivered once the new MX record is live, so messages are delayed rather than lost.
Yes, and in the other direction as well. Google to Microsoft is one of the most common moves we handle. The parts that need care are Google labels, which do not map one to one onto Outlook folders, and shared Google Calendars and Drive links embedded in old invitations. We map those explicitly rather than letting a tool guess.
Yes. Microsoft 365, still widely called Office 365, is the most common destination we migrate businesses to, including from on-premise Exchange, cPanel and hosted IMAP. If Microsoft 365 is where you are heading, our dedicated Microsoft 365 migration page covers tenant setup, licensing and the Exchange specifics in more depth.
They have to change, and this is the step that quietly breaks deliverability the day after a migration. Your SPF record must authorise the new platform to send on your behalf, DKIM has to be re-published for the new tenant, and DMARC has to be reviewed so it does not start rejecting your own mail. We prepare these records as part of the cutover, not as an afterthought.
Phones and desktop Outlook profiles need to re-authenticate against the new platform, because the old saved credentials no longer point anywhere valid. We prepare a short, plain-English set of instructions for your team and we are available during the first days after cutover for the people who get stuck. Autodiscover is configured so most clients find the new server themselves.
Yes. Retiring an ageing Exchange server is one of the main reasons businesses call us. Depending on the version and how many mailboxes you have, we either run a staged migration with coexistence, so both systems work at once, or a cutover migration in a single planned window for smaller teams. We recommend one or the other after the audit, not before.
Pairs well with
A migration is usually the moment a business finally looks at the rest of its IT. These are the things people ask us about next.
Worth a read once the mail is moved: AI automation for Australian SMEs, 7 workflow automations that save hours every week, and the full list of Vikilinks services.
Tell us where you are moving, and from what.
Two questions scope almost any email migration: which platforms are involved, and how many mailboxes. Answer those below and we will come back with a plan and a written quote.
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