We Need Our Rackspace Email Moved to Microsoft 365

"Rackspace email" covers two different products, and the migration path depends on which one you pay for. Rackspace Email is Rackspace's own mail platform, reached over IMAP or POP and through Rackspace webmail. Separately, Rackspace resells and manages Microsoft 365, and it has moved its older Hosted Exchange customers toward Microsoft 365. The first needs a real mailbox migration. The second is mostly a question of who controls the tenant and the licenses. We settle which one you have before anything else gets planned.

Three checks usually answer it. Look at your MX record: Microsoft 365 mail is delivered to a Microsoft host, typically one ending in protection.outlook.com, while Rackspace Email points at Rackspace's own mail servers. Look at where staff sign in for webmail: a Rackspace webmail page means Rackspace Email, a Microsoft sign-in followed by Outlook on the web means Microsoft 365. Then look at the control panel your office manager uses to add a user. We confirm it during the assessment either way.

For Rackspace Email, messages and folders are copied into Exchange Online using the IMAP migration built into the Exchange admin center, or a third-party migration tool when the mailbox count or folder structure calls for one. The first pass runs in the background while staff keep working in Rackspace. Incremental passes pick up new mail after that, so the final pass on cutover night is small. Folders and sent items come across. Server-side rules, webmail signatures and safe-sender lists don't, so we record them and rebuild them.

IMAP carries email and nothing else. Contacts, calendars and tasks kept in Rackspace webmail don't ride along with the mailbox copy, so they are exported for each user and imported into Outlook on the Microsoft 365 side. Shared calendars and recurring meetings get checked afterwards with the people who own them. Anyone who kept contacts only on a phone or in a desktop Outlook data file needs a different route, and we find them during the inventory.

Some Rackspace Email users connect with POP, which downloads mail to one computer and often removes it from the server. Their history may exist only in a local data file, which a server-side copy can't see. We identify those machines and import their files directly. If your account includes mail archiving, or people have parked years of mail in archive folders, that content is planned as its own step so it lands somewhere searchable.

Rackspace Email accounts collect aliases over the years, along with forwarders to outside addresses and generic logins like info@ or billing@ that several people share a password for. Each one is mapped before cutover. Aliases become extra addresses on a Microsoft 365 mailbox or a distribution group. Forwarders become groups or mail contacts, if they are still wanted at all. Shared logins become shared mailboxes with named permissions, so nobody passes a password around the office again.

If your mail already runs in Microsoft 365 but Rackspace bills and administers it, there may be little or no mail to copy. The work is getting full admin control of the tenant, deciding where licenses will be bought from now on, and removing delegated admin access you no longer want. Order is what matters here: replacement licenses are bought and assigned before the Rackspace subscription is cancelled. Whether sign-in changes depends on how the tenant was set up, and we confirm that in the assessment. Our GoDaddy Microsoft 365 page covers the same situation with a different reseller.

The cutover itself is a DNS change. The MX record moves from Rackspace to Microsoft 365 after its time-to-live has been lowered days ahead, and autodiscover, SPF, DKIM and DMARC are set up for the new platform. Every phone and desktop gets a fresh mail profile rather than an edited copy of the old Rackspace account. Staff get plain-English steps beforehand, the change is scheduled outside business hours, and Rackspace stays reachable until the final pass has been checked.