How to Migrate Office 365 Mailbox to Another User Account?

There can be several situations when an Office 365 administrator needs to move emails from one account to another in Office 365 this includes employee transition, account consolidation, etc. This write-up covers the entire migration process in detail. Go through this guide to ensure a successful data migration project using professional software.

“I am the system administrator in an organization and I have to transfer office 365 emails from one account to another due to department seperation. Nowadays, every day and night I am searching for a solution for it. Is there any solution to perform this operation easily? Can you please suggest to me an appropriate way to do the same?”

Scenario: It is quite obvious that the owner of the company wants to migrate email from one Office 365 account to another. Because the number of employees increasing day by day in an organization. Thus, it is hard to manage a large number of users in one domain. In this condition, it is necessary to separate the Office 365 user accounts of the employees according to the different departments and with separate billing arrangements.

Table of Content

• Reasons for Moving Emails from One Mailbox to Another
• Key Elements in Transferring Office 365 to Another Account
  • Stage #1 of Office 365 Migration Project Plan
  • Stage #2 – Prepare for Pre-Migration
  • Stage #3 Choosing the Right Approach
• Using the Office 365 Admin Center
• Use Automated Software to Move Emails
  • Stage #4 -Finish With The Post-Migration
• Conclusion
• FAQs

What are the Reasons for Moving Emails from One Mailbox to Another in Office 365?

Not only this there can be several reasons for this operation, some of them are as follows:

• When an employee leaves the organization or changes roles, the associated mailbox data must be transferred to the new user responsible for those tasks.
• At various times when the department undergoes restructuring or role realignment, the mailboxes need to be reassigned to align with the updated organizational structure.
• Facing errors in account creation, such as misspelled names or incorrect user details, requires migrating the mailbox to a new, accurately named account.
• To maintain security and manage access control, it becomes crucial to migrate an Office 365 mailbox to another user account, which can be part of security protocols.
• Also changes in subscription plans or service levels within Office 365, require moving mailboxes to different user accounts to match the new specifications.
• Migration might be necessary to resolve performance or technical issues affecting the mailbox’s accessibility, storage, or functionality.
• Another noteworthy reason could be due to compliance. As, ensuring email data is retained according to regulatory requirements.

You may love to know: How to perform Office 365 tenant to tenant migration in simple steps, without facing any issues. Follow this linked article to adopt a modern solution for this complex operation.

Like the above-discussed scenario and query, many more organizations decide to transfer email from one Office 365 account to another. As companies work in the cloud, they ask for the steps to go further and transfer the Office 365 mailbox to another account. But surprisingly there is no convenient native method available to perform this type of migration.

Microsoft has millions of happy Office 365 users around the world. And, the numbers are growing day by day since organizations are deciding to adopt the new cloud technology. If your organization has also decided to move its workforce to Office 365 then this is the article for you. 

You must know that Office 365 migration is not an easy task. So, you will need a foolproof plan for an error-free execution. This write-up will discuss the ins and outs of migration needs that will help you successfully move all your important data to Office 365.

Let’s have an in-depth analysis.

Also Read About: Office 365 Mailbox Types, Features & Their Significance

What Are The Key Elements in Transferring Office 365 Mailbox to Another Account?

Every project is incomplete without planning. And, it is essential to have a proper strategy before performing the actual migration to mitigate probable challenges.

The second element is to prepare a pre & post Office 365 migration checklist to make sure that you are equipped with everything you need and ready for the process.

Now, let’s discuss them individually to help you better understand.

Stage #1 of Office 365 Migration Project Plan: to Move Emails from One Account to Another

When you migrate an enterprise organization’s data to Office 365, it’s critical to plan thoroughly. Such as;

• The steps you want to follow
• When and how you are going to complete these steps
• The users who will finish the steps

Besides, planning will help you identify the key objectives of your migration project. And, you can refer back to it whenever you think something is missing out.

Also, through accurate strategy, you can almost nullify the possible challenges of Office 365 migration.

However, planning includes;

• Deciding when you want to carry out the process
• Assigning an estimated time frame for completion
• Scheduling team meetings with the concerned employees to execute a seamless migration

Once you are ready with the road map, it’s time to proceed toward the next phase.

Stage #2 of Microsoft Office 365 Migration Project Plan: Prepare for Pre-Migration

There are a ton of things you need to consider when moving emails from one account to another in O365 and for that, you have to list out the following;

• Establish Clear Communication: Well, you are taking such an important step like data migration which involves moving emails, documents, etc. Hence, you should let the staff know about the project scope, period, and what could be the impact on work.

Examine Your Current Environment Before Transferring Office 365 Mailbox to Another Account

This involves

• Listing out the number of servers and active users
• Check the method for creating accounts
• Number of licenses required by user accounts
• Network capacity is suitable or needs improvement
• Whether you need to arrange training sessions for end-users or not
• Requirement of Firewall, antivirus, setting authentication, router upgrade, etc.

Analyze On-premise Inventory: When you break down basic elements and prepare the inventory, then it will become easier to execute the migration.

• Make a list of all the names of user mailboxes as well as shared resources with size and email addresses
• Identify the desired storage locations, browser, OS versions, and configurations.
• Check for the internet connectivity, DNS hosts, proxy and firewall setup, available bandwidth, DNS record configurations, etc

Define List of Data to be Migrated: Now, it’s time to prepare the data for migration. For that,

• Make sure to update the active directory
• Get rid of all the unnecessary and unused user accounts
• Don’t forget to match the UPN of the source and destination
• Note that both offline and online archive facilities are needed in the future

Configure Office 365 Accounts: Lastly, gear up all the Office 365 accounts by,

• Having enough Office 365 licenses and subscriptions or else purchasing accordingly
• Don’t miss out on verifying the domain names
• Compile all the security permissions, applications for use, etc.

When you ensure that you are all set to move your data to the destination, then comes the next phase.

Stage #3 Choosing the Right Approach for Office 365 Transfer Emails from One Account to Another

As we all know, there is no direct way or tool offered by Microsoft to perform this operation. Hence, we have to get it done through other indirect ways. You can perform this operation by setting email forwarding on the source Office 365 accounts. However, it has various limitations, which we will discuss in the coming section.

Move Emails from One Mailbox to Another Using the Office 365 Admin Center

Follow the below steps carefully, to set email forwarding in Office 365. 

Step 1. To open the Office 365 admin center, you have to navigate to this URL – https://admin.microsoft.com in your respective browser.

Step 2. Now, from the left pane, click on Users, and then from the dropdown click on Active Users. It will open the existing Office 365 users’ accounts associated with the respective Admin account.

Step 3. Choose the required user accounts that you want to migrate. Then click on the Mail option from the right pane. 

Step 4. Then Click on the Manage email forwarding option.

Step 5. Now, enable Forward all emails sent to this mailbox checkbox.

Step 6. Now provide the destination email address, where you want to move the new upcoming emails. 

Step 7. Enable the required options and then click on the Save Changes button. 

Note: You need to assign the respective licenses to both users, to set the email forwarding. 

Setbacks of Manual Methos of Email Forwarding 

• You must have technical knowledge and admin access to set up email forwarding. 
• It is not a direct or practical alternative solution to this situation.
• You can not set forwarding for old email data, it will only work for upcoming emails.  
• Most importantly, you have to keep the source account active with proper licensing, which will increase the cost.
• Setting up email forwarding for multiple user accounts can be a daunting and time-consuming task.

Use Automated Software to Move Emails from One Account to Another in Office 365

From the above drawbacks, it becomes clear, that email forwarding is not the right way to migrate the data. Moreover, it has various limitations too. Hence, many Microsoft 365 administrators suggest opting for a professional tool to complete this migration job. Thus, keeping this in mind, we are going to show you how to move emails from one account to another in Office 365 using Office 365 to Office 365 Migration Tool. Before migration, you need to follow some prerequisites that are given in the below section.

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Some Points You Need to Remember Before Migration

Before you migrate email from one Office 365 account to another, make sure you have Office 365 license assigned and you can access the OWA for admin. Also, it is required that both source and destination admin accounts should be impersonated and you have a “Mailbox Import Export” role as well as the admin user.

A few Important Prerequisites to Transfer Office 365 Mailbox to Another Account

1. Before migrating emails from one account to another account with this tool you have to create a project in Microsoft Azure and generate an Application ID to perform the migration. To create a project Read More.
2. After creating a project and generating an Application ID in Azure, we have to get an activation code for the Software to move email data from one account to another account. To activate software Read More.

Automated Steps with Screenshots for Office 365 Move Emails from One Account to Another

Step 1. First, launch the software and select Office 365 as the source and destination then click on Next.

Step 2. With this tool, you can migrate emails and other items documents, contacts, and calendars to another Office 365 account.

Step 3. If you want to migrate selective data you can use the Date Filter option. Apply Date Filter click on Next.

Step 4. After that, login source tenant with Admin Email and Application ID and click on the validate button to validate permission, then transfer the Office 365 mailbox to another account.

Step 5. Now, login destination tenant with Admin Email and Application ID, then click on the Validate button and then next.

Step 6. Here you have to click on Fetch Users to fetch source tenant users to move emails from one account to another Office 365.

Step 7. The software also provides a mapping option to create the mapping between source and destination accounts. To do this task you have to import the CSV file in which you will maintain the source and destination user IDs. Now you can see all users are fetched, now import destination users.

Step 8. Source and destination users are mapped, now click on the validate button to move emails from one account to another Office 365.

Step 9. Source and destination permissions are validated. Click on the Start Migration button to start the migration process.

Step 10. The software starts migrating emails from one Office 365 account to another Office 365 account. It will take a few minutes to complete the migration process.

Stage #4 of Microsoft Office 365 Migration Project Plan: Have a Great Finish With The Post-Migration

You should not ignore this very last step. It includes,

• Redirecting the email accounts of users to Office 365 and confirming the status of each folder. It must show as ‘The folder is Up to date
• It’s mandatory to assign licenses to the mailboxes that are migrated within 30 days. Otherwise, it will get deactivated.
• To easily connect your mailboxes to Outlook email clients, you need to configure Autodiscover DNS records in Office 365.
• Once you make sure that you are not going to need the source environment in the future, you can close it down.

Also Read: How to Import PST files to Shared Mailbox in Office 365?

Features That Make It Stand Alone for Moving Emails to Another Account:

The software also provides three options for Re-Run Migration. So, that users can re-run this data transfer without creating duplicate files. Below are the three remarkable features that make this utility stand-alone for transferring Office 365 mailboxes to another account.

• Retry Failed migration – If items failed in the initial migration process.
• Run Full Migration – If items are skipped in the previous migration process.
• Delta Migration – If you want to migrate newly arrived data to the destination account.

Conclusion

It is not an easy task to move emails from one account to another in Office 365, various aspects need to be determined. So, in this article, we have explained a step-by-step procedure to perform this complex operation without losing a bit of data. This is a hassle-free tried and tested solution that helps to quickly perform this type of migration with maximum data security.

FAQs

Q1. How to move emails from one account to another in Office 365 without PowerShell?

If you do not want to explore the manual method and require a systematic way without the need for PowerShell, then you can use the above tool and follow these steps.

5 Quick Steps to Transfer Office 365 Mailbox from One Account to Another

• Step 1. Install & Launch Tool > Select Office 365.
• Step 2. Select Mailbox Items > Apply Date Filter.
• Step 3. Provide O365 Admin Details > Validate.
• Step 4. Create Mapping >Validate > Select Users.
• Step 5. Click on > Start Migration Button.

Q2. Can I migrate different mailboxes using this software?

Yes, using the above software solution you can migrate shared mailbox to Office 365 and also the in-place archive mailbox.  You just need to select the user IDs and then provide the destination email ID and hit the start button. In this way, you can easily migrate different types of mailboxes to another account in Office 365.