The reason people stay on an email provider they dislike is almost never the software. It is the fear that somewhere in twelve years of mail there is a password reset, an invoice, or a contract that will quietly stop arriving. That fear is reasonable — but the failure modes are well understood, and there are only about six of them.
This is provider-agnostic. It works whether you are moving to Mailotte, Proton, Fastmail, or your own server.
Before you move anything: the inventory
The single biggest cause of a bad migration is treating your inbox as a pile of messages. It is not. It is an identity that dozens of other systems point at. Spend twenty minutes listing:
- Accounts that use this address to log in. Search your mail for "verify your email", "reset your password" and "welcome to" — that is a faster inventory than trying to remember.
- Two-factor recovery. Any service where this mailbox is the account-recovery route. These must move first, not last.
- Anything financial. Banks, tax authorities, payroll, invoicing. These often have the slowest change process and the worst consequences for a missed message.
- Mailing lists and subscriptions you actually want. Most people discover during a migration that this list is about six items long, and use the move to drop the rest.
The order that works
- Create the new mailbox and leave the old one running. Never close an account you are migrating away from. You are adding a mailbox, not replacing one, until step 6.
- Import your history. Almost every provider can pull your old mail over IMAP. Do this before you change any addresses, so the new mailbox is already searchable when you start living in it. Expect large mailboxes to take hours; that is normal.
- Set up forwarding from the old address to the new one. This is the safety net for everything you forget in the inventory. Anything still pointing at the old address keeps arriving where you are now reading.
- Change your address at the important services, slowly. Recovery routes and financial accounts first. Then the ordinary ones as they show up in your forwarded mail — the forwarding turns migration into an ongoing background task instead of one long afternoon.
- Send from the new address for a full month. The people who mail you are also a directory that needs updating, and replying from the new address updates it for free.
- Only then consider closing the old account — and honestly, keep it. A dormant forwarding mailbox costs nothing and catches the long tail: the annual renewal, the one-per-year statement, the friend who never updated your contact card.
The two steps everyone skips
Export your contacts before you stop using the old client — they live in a different system from your mail and do not come across with an IMAP import. And check your calendar invites: recurring meetings are pinned to the address that accepted them, so a standing invite will keep going to the old mailbox until the organiser re-invites you.
What actually breaks, and what does not
Does not break: your old mail (it copies, it does not move), your ability to search it, your attachments, or your ability to go back. An IMAP import is a copy — the original is untouched.
Does break, briefly: mail rules and filters, which are provider-specific and have to be rebuilt; app passwords for any mail client; and any automation pointed at the old mailbox. Rules are worth rebuilding from scratch rather than porting — most people are maintaining filters for a life they no longer live.
Deliverability, if you use a custom domain: this is the one genuinely technical step. Your domain's MX records point at the old host, and SPF, DKIM and DMARC records authorise it to send. All of them have to be updated together, and DNS changes take time to propagate. Change MX last, after the new provider is fully set up and its DKIM key is published, and expect a window where both hosts receive mail.
How long it takes
Realistically: an hour of setup, a few hours of unattended import, and then about a month of low-effort tail. Anyone promising a clean switch in ten minutes is not counting the tail, which is where all the risk lives.
Mailotte imports from Gmail or any IMAP provider, and supports standard IMAP and SMTP with an app password, so your existing mail apps keep working through the move. If you are weighing providers first, the comparison of the main private email services lays out the trade-offs.