Migrating email from current email provider to Microsoft O365
We would like to confirm our understanding of how to migrate emails from a current email provider to O365. Users all have Outlook 2013. These are our anticipated steps:
1. Procure the O365 accounts.
2. Add the O365 accounts to Outlook.
3. Change the MX record at the domain registrar to point to the new email provider (O365).
4. Export emails and contacts from the old accounts to a .pst file.
6. Import the .pst file to the new accounts in Outlook.
Question 1: It is clear to us that Outlook will now contain the old emails, and will start to receive the new ones... but how does the O365 web mail server get those old emails? Will they sync up automatically? Or would we need to use the "Network Upload Method" we have seen referenced. (In general, unless we can be convinced otherwise, we would prefer using methods that are more manual than highly automated, and perhaps more technically complex. We only have a few mailboxes to migrate and they are small in size.)
Question 2: We intend to move the domain registration from the current registrar to Microsoft. Would we be correct to assume that we should do all the email boxes first, wait for the dust to settle (a day or two), then just move the domain registration to Microsoft?
Thank you.
1. Procure the O365 accounts.
2. Add the O365 accounts to Outlook.
3. Change the MX record at the domain registrar to point to the new email provider (O365).
4. Export emails and contacts from the old accounts to a .pst file.
6. Import the .pst file to the new accounts in Outlook.
Question 1: It is clear to us that Outlook will now contain the old emails, and will start to receive the new ones... but how does the O365 web mail server get those old emails? Will they sync up automatically? Or would we need to use the "Network Upload Method" we have seen referenced. (In general, unless we can be convinced otherwise, we would prefer using methods that are more manual than highly automated, and perhaps more technically complex. We only have a few mailboxes to migrate and they are small in size.)
Question 2: We intend to move the domain registration from the current registrar to Microsoft. Would we be correct to assume that we should do all the email boxes first, wait for the dust to settle (a day or two), then just move the domain registration to Microsoft?
Thank you.
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1) Once you upload them to Outlook, they will sync automatically to the server. There's also a server-side upload process which might be a better choice depending on the number of mailboxes and their size: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/compliance/use-network-upload-to-import-pst-files
And if you have really large environment or want to automate things, there are third-party tools that do things much better compared to the solution Microsoft offers.
2) You can do it at any point, Microsoft will actually ask you this as part of the initial domain verify process. Which you should do as part of the steps btw, you need the domain to be verified in O365 in order to receive mail on addresses associated with it, simply changing the MX isnt sufficient.
And if you have really large environment or want to automate things, there are third-party tools that do things much better compared to the solution Microsoft offers.
2) You can do it at any point, Microsoft will actually ask you this as part of the initial domain verify process. Which you should do as part of the steps btw, you need the domain to be verified in O365 in order to receive mail on addresses associated with it, simply changing the MX isnt sufficient.
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