Moving company email without losing a single message

Company email is the system nobody talks about as long as it works. But if a few emails get lost during a move, or the proposals you send land in spam, it means days of frustration. This is the order we follow when moving an existing account to a new Google Workspace — most recently for Egyensúly Gazdaságkutató és Tanácsadó.

Inventory first, everything else after

Most mistakes come from something missing from the list. Before touching anything, we list the mailboxes, the aliases, the group addresses (such as info@ or office@), existing forwarding rules, shared calendars and files. Also who reads their email on which device and in which app — this step saves a lot of phone calls at the end.

Don't switch over from one moment to the next

The route email takes is set by the domain's MX records, and changes to them don't reach everyone at once: mail servers around the world keep sending to the old address for as long as they hold the previous setting. So a few days before the switch we lower its lifetime, so the change spreads in hours rather than days. And we keep the old mailbox alive for weeks — if mail still arrives there from somewhere, it isn't lost.

The spam folder doesn't fill up by accident

After a move, the most common complaint is that sent emails don't arrive. It's almost always missing domain authentication: SPF says which servers may send in your name, DKIM signs the messages, and DMARC sets what should happen if something doesn't add up. We align all three with the new account and watch the reports for the first few days before tightening the policy.

Forwarding from the old addresses

If addresses change with the move, the old ones can't disappear overnight. Business cards, proposals, invoices and Google results will show the old address for months. So we set up forwarding from the old addresses to the new ones, and only remove it once nothing has arrived there for months.

For those who don't use email in the browser

Every team has someone who uses a desktop email client out of habit. We set these accounts up separately — in Thunderbird, for example — so old messages stay where they are and sending goes through the new account. This is the point where a move looks finished but really isn't.

How long does it take?

Preparation is the longer part: inventory, DNS groundwork, a test account. The switch itself usually falls in a quieter period, and afterwards we monitor the traffic for a few days. The exact timeline always depends on the size of the company and the number of mailboxes — we can estimate it in the first conversation.

We also manage email and domains for clients whose websites we build, such as Heaven Properties. If you're facing something similar, see what we do, or write to us on the contact page.