Transferring an old Hotmail/Outlook.com/Live email archive to your new gov.uk mailbox

Transferring an old Hotmail/Outlook.com/Live email archive to your new gov.uk mailbox

This article guides you through copying your email archive from your Hotmail, Outlook.com or Live.com email address.

Info
For clarity, when we say "your Outlook account", we mean the service Outlook.com / Hotmail / Live, rather than the desktop email software called Outlook. If we ever need to reference the mail software, we'll call it "Outlook Desktop".
You may want others to port their email archive over as well. This guidance will allow you to do that as well.

Method

Step 1 - Getting an authentication URL

  1. Log into your Email Admin Panel
  2. Click on Data Migration in the left-hand menu
  3. Click Start Data Migration
  4. Give the migration a name, e.g. "Outlook migration"
  5. Select IMAP from the protocol drop-down
  6. Enter outlook.office365.com as the Source Server Address
  7. Leave all other settings and click Add
  8. Under the Preferred Authentication Type select One-time authentication by each user
  9. Hover over the little (?) icon next to the one-time option and click the copy icon to copy the long URL. This is your authentication URL that we're going to use later. You can paste this to a notepad or word document for the time-being to keep it safe.
  10. Click Add
  11. Change the storage option to 95%
  12. Click Create





Step 2 - Allow your GOV.UK email system to read your Outlook/Hotmail

After the last section you'll be taken to a page which has "Status Yet to Start" in orange near the top. Leave that there for now, we'll come back to this tab later.

We're now going to use the Authentication URL we copied in the last section.
  1. Open a new Tab in your web browser and paste the URL link into the address bar, and hit enter/go.
  2. You'll be prompted to pick an account or sign into your outlook/hotmail account. Select the outlook.com or hotmail.com account you wish to transfer
  3. Accept the prompt giving access to your mailbox. Note, this is quite a tall notification. You may have to scroll down a bit.
  4. You'll get a notification saying "Zoho Mail Migration, Successfully Verified".
  5. Close this tab.
If you want your colleagues/councillors to have their Outlook transferred as well, they'll need to follow a very similar process. You can copy the following bullet-points for them:
  1. Log into your new GOV.UK email address provided by Parish Online in your web browser.
  2. Open a new Tab in your web browser and paste the URL link into the address bar, and hit enter/go.
  3. You'll be prompted to pick an account or sign into your outlook/hotmail account. Select the outlook.com or hotmail.com account you wish to transfer
  4. Accept the prompt giving access to your mailbox. Note, this is quite a tall notification. You may have to scroll down a bit.
  5. You'll get a notification saying "Zoho Mail Migration, Successfully Verified".
  6. Close this tab.

Notes
If you have colleagues or councillors who want their old mailboxes transferred as well, email them the Authentication link you saved in the first step and get them to do the same. Ask them to confirm when they've done it.






Step 3 - Starting the Transfer

Now that you and your colleagues/councillors have given your new GOV.UK access to your old one, you can begin the transfer of emails and folders.
  1. Go back to the tab in your web browser we left at the end of Step 1. If you've lost that page, don't worry, go here https://mailadmin.zoho.eu/cpanel/home.do#dataMigration/migrations/list and click on your named migration "Outlook Migration" or similar.
  2. Click on the Users tab
  3. Click Add
  4. Enter the old Outlook or Hotmail email address in the top box
  5. Enter your new GOV.UK email address in the bottom box (it should auto-suggest as you type to save time)
  6. Click Add
  7. Repeat for any other email address you need to transfer.
  8. Click Start Migration
The migration will process. You can close down your tab and computer if you wish. It will continue to work without your computer switched on.

It may take anywhere from 5 minutes to 5 hours to transfer depending on the size of your Outlook/Hotmail mailbox.

If you use up all the space in your new GOV.UK account, contact support and we share storage options. Once increased, the migration can be resumed without restarting or duplicating emails.



Step 4 - Set up Automatic Forwarding

We recommend setting up automatic forwarding so incoming emails get delivered to your new gov.uk domain.

Here's guidance for doing that.