Forwarding?

We are moving our office to another city. As of now we do not have a POP3 account for emails, they are coming into our 2003 server in the office. We dont have a huge office here, just a few terminals in a sever. We are trying to determine how to handle emails durring the couple days we take to move the office equipment. Im hoping to forward the emails to a gmail account during the transition from our Outlook. Is something like this possible? Ive never messed with Outlook because I generally detest anything Microsoft makes. So if anyone has any pointers or advice it would be appreciated. Thanks!

So your email is handled by your 2003 server?

Outlook is a mail client.. not a server. Therefore, for you to receive emails into Outlook, you guys either have POP or IMAP setup. In outlook, is everything downloaded to local folders, or is there a seperate account listed? You can generally go to accounts --> Edit to find out whether it's pop or imap.

If your server is handled internally, then you would need to setup another mail server to temporarily handle email while you move equipment. Forwarding mail to gmail (or something of the sort) won't do much of anything if the server is taken down to be moved. There are online mail servers that you may be able to use for your situation. I believe dyndns.com has a mx handler.... then there's also rollernet.us

Please clarify if this doesn't answer your question.

Its a small business 2003 server. Obviously Outlook is just the mail client, sorry I didnt clarify. I dont know a whole lot about the internal setup other than the kind of server. I know the boss says we absolutely do not have a POP account for it. And I do know that outlook has at least 4 different mail accounts setup on the server.

We were thinking the best way to do this may be to leave the server and one terminal setup in the building up until the very last load of goods get transported across town. That way the mail server is only down for a night at most. Only problem is our website has a shopping cart that submits emails to confirm when orders are recieved. So thats why we wanted to forward the mail from 2 mail accounts to a gmail account.

This means that you have an IMAP account


This may very well be an option depending on whether or not you may lose business


Forwarding mail to gmail won't help if the server is down.

Is the entire DNS hosted internally, or just a mail server? If the DNS is external, then you can log in to your domans control panel to forward the mail. If it's internal, then you'll need to temporarily setup an external DNS/mail server. Either that, or as mentioned above, move it over at a time that you guys have the least amount of traffic, therefore minimizing any problems you may have in taking the server down for a night.

Who is your Domain Name Registrar? Many, such as GoDaddy, automatically host your email (until you change your public DNS to point to your server) and you may want to switch it back to them in the mean time and you can change it back once your move is complete...


Small Business Server uses Exchange 2003. Exchange 2003 uses the MAPI protocol. Very similiar to IMAP, but is Microsoft proprietary and much more robust. Sending and receiving is still handled by the SMTP virtual server.

I believe we are using GoDaddy to forward the emails to our server. I discussed this with the boss today and she doesnt even care now. It seems like she is willing to drive up to the shop in the middle of the night on a weekend and transport everything to the new office. So all the power to her!

I would guess we could easily set this up to forward somewhere else as it has to be setup in GoDaddy since they were our last webhost, which has now changed. So if we do decide to go that route I will have to get the info for GoDaddy and find out how to reconfigure the DNS's. Thanks for the help folks!

Just an FYI:

If you decide to go the GoDaddy route and aren't quite sure what to do, log into your account and find the customer service number. They have a WONDERFUL live tech support you can call and they will tell you EVERYTHING you need to know...