Not happy with your current mail server?  Are you held hostage for your email any time your shared hosting account is suspended for reasons beyond your control?  Want to host your email somewhere else for redundancy purposes?  If you said “yes” to any of these questions, then please keep reading.

The last few days have been incredibly stressful for me as my account has been suspended twice due to reasons beyond my control.  Both times, my mail was held hostage and I was left without the ever-useful function for a total of 48 hours.  I won’t blame my webhost for this, though, as they were simply following procedure.  That said, I can’t stand not having access to my mail … especially when this is used daily for work purposes as well as for trouble-ticketing.  But what options do I have?  I like my current email address, and everyone who needs to know it has been using it for years … it would be a terrible thing to update dozens of websites with my new information as well as the 200-or-so people currently in my contact list.

Moving Mail Servers

GoDaddy Email PackagesGoDaddy has a good number of services available for a reasonable price and, considering the lack of negative publicity for their email service online, I figured that they’d be a reliable and trustworthy vendor.  They have basic email packages starting at $1.19 a month, and better ones for twice as much.  I opted for the deluxe package which has IMAP access.  Ten minutes and $25 later, I was up and running with a new email package.

From here, I was able to immediately begin setting up the accounts through the “Email Management” tab on GoDaddy’s admin panel.

GoDaddy - Setting Up Email With Existing DomainWhen setting up a new account, we have the option to use a domain that is hosted elsewhere.  Select this option and type in the email address that you would like to use.  From there, a password will be required and you can specify what extra services that account will be able to use, such as Calendar and Web Store services.

Once this is done, we need to update the MX records on our web server.  If you use cPanel to administer your web host, then the next few steps will be incredibly simple.

cPanel - MX EntryFind the MX Entry icon on your cPanel Administration screen and open that sucker up.  Once loaded, you’ll see the insanely simple “Change MX Entry” panel along the top.  Make sure that the domain in the combobox is the one that you want to change, and then enter a FQDN (Fully Qualified Domain Name) into the empty box and set a priority.

cPanel - MX Entry (Edit)

Priority 0 is top priority, while 10 is the lowest.  If you’re using the email server provided through GoDaddy (SecureServer.net), you can enter the following domains:

Priority 0 –  smtp.secureserver.net
Priority 10 –  mailstore1.secureserver.net

One thing I should mention, though, is that the original MX entry for the domain must also be deleted.

From here, the changes will require a few hours to take hold, but you’ll be good to go.  All the mail sent to your preferred email server will now be sent to the new email server.

Accessing Your New Email Server

Be sure to update any email applications that use this domain, too.

For POP  Accounts:

Incoming: pop.secureserver.net (Port 110 – SSL Uses 995)
Outgoing:  smtpout.secureserver.net (Ports 25, 80, 3535 – SSL Uses 465)

For IMAP Accounts:

Incoming:  imap.secureserver.net (Port 110 – SSL Uses 995)
Outgoing: smtpout.secureserver.net (Ports 25, 80, 3535 – SSL Uses 465)

And that’s all there is to it!