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Updated: 01/12/2026
( 12 minutes reading )
Migrating emails is a critical task when moving your website or business operations to a new hosting environment. Email communication is one of the most important services for both businesses and individuals - it serves as the backbone of customer interactions, order confirmations, support requests, and day-to-day correspondence.
Losing access to old emails or failing to transfer them properly can disrupt workflows and damage credibility.
Thankfully, Plesk makes the process straightforward with its Import Mail Messages functionality, which allows you to securely copy emails from an existing mail server into your Plesk-hosted mailboxes. This feature removes the complexity of manual migration and ensures your communication history remains intact.
In this tutorial, we’ll guide you step by step through the process of migrating your emails to Plesk using the import tool.
Let’s begin!
First and foremost, please ensure you are logged in to your Plesk control panel. To do that, please enter your IP address, hostname, or domain name inside your web browser’s search bar and add “:8443” at the end. It should look something like: “https://yourdomain.com:8443”. By doing so, you will be prompted by a login form that requests your username and password.
After logging in with your username and password, Plesk will automatically display the “Websites & Domains” page, which will serve as the index page from where you can manage everything related to your websites and domains on Plesk. If that is not the case, please select the “Websites & Domains” option from the left side menu.
From the “Websites & Domains” page, please expand all the available tools by clicking the little pointed down arrow at the far left side of the row corresponding to the website you want to check the log for.
Performing this action will display all available tools and functionalities that you can use to manage your website.
To navigate to the email transfer section, please click on the “Mail” tab, and from there, you will have access to all the available email-related functionalities. Once Pleks reveals all the available options, please select the “Mail Importing” functionality.
Importing mail messages refers to transferring your emails from a different web hosting server using the IMAP protocol. As explained in the previous paragraph, once you click on the “Mail Importing” functionality, you will be redirected to the page allowing you to enter your previous server’s IMAP details and initiate the process. To start, please click on the “Import Mail Messages” button located near the top left area of your screen.
Performing this action will open a pop-up window where you need to enter your previous server’s IMAP details. Please refer to the required information below:
The settings listed underneath are revealed after clicking on the “Show advanced options” link.
Once you have entered all the information above, please click on the “Ok” button located at the bottom of the pop-up window to begin the process.
As mentioned above, to begin the migration, please click on the “Ok” button at the bottom of the page. Performing this action will cause a very short loading page, and eventually, the process will begin. The pop-up window will close, and you will see a table section on the page behind it, populated with the record of the email migration you just performed.
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In the table section itself, you will see a few things that will give you information about the transfer’s status:
Every single migration you perform will be added to this table section, so you can have records for each of them and know their status.
After the process completes, open the mailbox in Webmail (via the Webmail link in the Mail tab) or in your configured email client to verify that all the folders and messages have been migrated. In addition to that, we recommend:
Migrating emails to Plesk is straightforward with the built-in Import Mail Messages tool. By following these steps, you can securely transfer your old emails, preserve folder structures, and ensure business continuity without data loss.
With your emails now safely hosted on Plesk, you can enjoy reliable mail services, easier management, and a fully integrated communication solution.
Nikola is an accomplished tech-savvy extraordinaire with over six years of experience in the web hosting field. He started as a customer care representative and quickly rose the ranks to become a support supervisor and, eventually - the head of the technical department in HostArmada. His deep understanding of the client's needs, combined with his technical knowledge, makes him the perfect man to create the ideal harmony between client satisfaction and professional problem-solving. You will often find him creating helpful tutorials, articles, and blog posts that help existing customers get around.
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