EdbMails Plesk to Office 365 migration tool

Plesk, like cPanel, is a web hosting service that includes email services. It has a dedicated control panel for Linux and Windows users to access and manage their webmail accounts. While Plesk is appropriate for small business users, it lacks many of the advanced collaboration features offered by Office 365. When business demands and requirements change, there is a growing demand to migrate to other services and solutions. For instance, if you host your email on Plesk, you need to pay for the server upkeep and maintenance. Moving to Microsoft 365 has the advantage of eliminating the need for server maintenance and monitoring. Another benefit of Office 365 is that all of your desktop office applications, such as PowerPoint, Excel, and Word, are integrated with the cloud and vice versa. You can begin drafting a document and pick up where you left off on your home computer. Office 365 also includes SharePoint, Teams, and a variety of license plans, making it a popular choice among businesses. Although Plesk boasts a centralized control panel with over 100 extensions, it falls far short of Microsoft's admin center, which allows you to manage everything under one roof.

EdbMails Office 365 migration with IMAP is a Microsoft partnered software that can help you to switch your server from Plesk to Microsoft Office 365. The pre-migration procedures, the actual migration, and the post-migration activities are covered in this article.

1. Plesk to Office 365 migration plan

   Planning is one of the important factors to take into account. Setting up a backup strategy, getting the source and target environments ready, and testing your backup approach are all necessary to lower risks and prevent data loss. The following are the list of items to consider before the move.

   1. Ensure that your current mailboxes, mail, and source data are fully backed up.
   2. Select the number of mailboxes you wish to transfer from Plesk to Office 365.
   3. List all the Plesk data and permissions you want to migrate.
   4. Create the necessary user mailboxes and assign licenses in Office 365.
   5. Make sure you have enough network and bandwidth for migration.
   6. Perform a test migration before you start the actual relocation.

2. Pre migration activities for Plesk to Office 365 migration

   Follow the below pre-migration activities while migrating Plesk to Office 365

   1. Ensure that you have admin access Plesk and Office 365 accounts
      

      The admin account that has all the necessary permissions to migrate mailboxes on behalf of all the users in your organization. Make sure to assign the Organization Management role group and impersonation rights to the admin user on Office 365.

   2. Create Office 365 mailboxes and assign the licenses

       Click here to Add users and assign licenses to Office 365 users

       Assign Microsoft 365 licenses to user accounts

   3. To migrate Plesk mailboxes to Office 365 Public folders, ensure that you create a public folder and assign users to mailboxes on the Office 365 server.

       Create Office 365 Public folder and assign mailbox user

   4. If you are in plan to migrate mailboxes to Office 365 archive mailboxes, ensure to enable In-Place archive in Office 365 admin center.

       Steps to enable archive mailbox in Microsoft 365.

   5. If you have a custom email domain from the source which you want to retain and receive emails to, you must add and verify the domain on Office 365.

       Steps to add a custom domain to Office 365 and steps to add DNS records to connect your domain.

   6. Customize the message size limits for large size messages

       Follow the steps to increase the message size on Office 365 to 150MB. See message size limits on Office 365 for more information.

3. Plesk to Office 365 migration using Edbmails

   The migration involves adding and verifying your Plesk domain in Office 365 using a TXT or MX record and setting up a migration batch from the Exchange admin center (EAC) to migrate all your mailboxes to Microsoft 365.

   We first describe the manual migration method, followed by a detailed description of EdbMails IMAP to Office 365 migration method, which can simplify the entire operation.

   • Steps to migrate Plesk to Office 365 from the EAC

     • Step 1: Select and purchase a suitable Microsoft 365 license plan

       Before you begin the migration, make sure you have a Microsoft 365 tenant set up. You can select from a variety of license plans for small and large businesses, or you can continue using the trial version if you intend to purchase a suitable license later.

     • Step 2: Create user mailboxes from the Office 365 admin center

       You must create user mailboxes in the admin center and ensure that each user has an operational mailbox. In addition, create Public folders if you need to migrate to them.

     • Step 3: Validate the Plesk domain on Microsoft 365 by adding a TXT record

       The next step is to add and validate your Plesk domain in Office 365 so that users can continue to receive emails from the original domain. To do so, go to the Office 365 admin center's Domains page, copy the TXT value and paste it into the DNS settings under Websites and Domains on your Plesk server.

     • Step 4: Add the MX and SPF records to your domain on Plesk

       Obtain the MX record information from the Office 365 admin center, and then navigate to the DNS settings to add an MX record to your Plesk server. Save the values for Host Name, Record Type, Point to this address, and TTL. Repeat for CNAME and SPF records. It should be noted that this only forwards new emails from Plesk to Office 365 and does not migrate existing emails. Follow the steps below to migrate all existing emails.

     • Step 5: Create a CSV file with a list of users to migrate from Plesk

       It's now time to create a CSV file containing a list of all users, along with their usernames and passwords, that you'll need for the migration batch in the following step.

     • Step 6: Create a migration endpoint and batch from the EAC

       Create a migration endpoint in the Office 365 Exchange admin center by entering the IMAP server details and a migration batch by uploading the CSV file you just created. After the migration batch has been verified, you can begin the migration and check the sync status. The migration will be complete once the status changes to Synced.

     • Step 7: Verify the email synchronization after the migration

       After the migration is complete, verify that all of your users are receiving emails from Plesk and leave the migration batch running for 2-3 days to allow for email synchronization.

     • Step 8: Delete the migration batch and decommission your old server

       Finally, after ensuring that emails from your senders are being delivered to the Microsoft 365 tenant account, you can delete the migration batch and decommission your server on Plesk.

       The manual method described above has the limitation of requiring extensive pre-planning and time if you want to complete the migration without difficulty. Furthermore, there are no additional options if you only want to migrate a few folders or items. Creating a CSV file requires precision in the same format, as many users have reported that incorrect format leads to errors during batch verification.

   • Steps to migrate Plesk to Office 365 using EdbMails

     EdbMails can help you easily migrate all of your emails from Plesk IMAP server to Office 365. It's easy to use migration interface allows you to load all of your mailboxes, select the items, and initiate migration without getting stressed about the technicalities. It requires no expertise and includes built-in settings for granular and incremental (no-duplicate) migration. Without further ado, let's go over how to use the application to migrate to Office 365.

     • Step 1: Download and install EdbMails migration application

       Download and install the EdbMails application on any computer

       Either choose ‘Login’ or ‘Start Your Free Trial’ to proceed

       

       

       Choose ‘IMAP Migration’ from the dropdown options

       

     • Step 2: Connect to the Plesk server using IMAP

       To connect to a single user mailbox, enter the Host Name , Port Number (993 for SSL), and account credentials

       

       Choose 'Multiple (bulk) Users/Accounts Migration' load multiple user mailbox. Select ‘Connect to IMAP’ and download the sample CSV file and fill in the required details. Load the CSV file into EdbMails and verify the list mailboxes.

       

     • Step 3: Choose Plesk mailboxes and migrate to Office 365

       EdbMails displays all the source mailboxes / folders / subfolders in the application’s left panel where you can choose all of them or select only the required folders for migration. If this is your first migration with EdbMails, it will be a full migration. On subsequent migrations to the same target from the same computer, the migration is incremental to avoid duplicates.

       Now, choose ‘Migrate to Office 365’ as highlighted in the below screenshot

       

     • Step 4: Connect to target Office 365

       EdbMails allows both classic and modern authentication for Office 365 connection. You can select ‘Auto’ or ‘Manual’ registration for modern authentication and choose one of the required connection methods from Mailboxes, Public folder and Archive mailbox. The application will load mailboxes automatically or you can load Office 365 mailboxes using a CSV file.

     • Step 5: Start the migration to Office 365 from Plesk

       After the successful target server connection, proceed to mailbox mapping and start the migration operation. Finally, verify the migration and the count of folders, mailboxes and items with the log report.

     Additional options and settings

     You have an include and exclude folder and filter options in the EdbMails migration interface. Click the gear icon (Settings) in the migration window and customize the settings as per the migration requirement.

     • You can enable filters to migrate items based on ‘Sender Address’, ‘Date’, ‘Subject’, ‘Attachment’ etc.
     • You can include and exclude standard folders for migration such as Inbox, Sent, Drafts.

     Furthermore, there are additional options to migrate permissions, removing deleted source items from target folders on the right panel of the migration window.

     Click on the link if you would like to know more about EdbMails IMAP migration tool

     Here are the step-by-step instructions to export emails from IMAP server to PST.

4. Post-migration tasks

   • Step 1: Update DNS records (MX record) to point to Office 365

     If you have not done this step previously, change the DNS records known as MX records to enable and receive email messages on the target Office 365 server. In addition to this setup, configure the Autodiscover record to allow Outlook to connect to the migrated mailboxes.

   • Step 2: Decommission or delete the user mailboxes on Plesk server

     After you verify that you are correctly receiving emails on Office 365, you can safely decommission and disable user mailboxes on the source Plesk server.

   • Step 3: Create a new Outlook profile for users in the new domain

     Remove any previous instances of Plesk accounts on Outlook to avoid conflicts with the new server. Configure and recreate the Outlook profile for each user in your domain if it has problems connecting to Office 365 mailboxes.