An installation and fit-out contractor had its email on a hosted Exchange product sold by its domain registrar, rather than in a Microsoft 365 tenant of its own. The service kept becoming unavailable, and the business asked us to move it.
It’s an easy set-up to end up with. You buy a domain, the registrar offers email in the same checkout, and a few years later nobody’s sure where the mailboxes actually live or who controls them.
We logged 3.5 hours on the move across two days in July 2026.
Day one: finding the keys
Before we could move anything we needed access to what was there. We collected the logins for the registrar account and for the hosted Exchange management console, went through the products on the account, and recorded the details in our documentation.
Then we created a new Microsoft 365 tenant for the business, added its domain and verified it. Nothing changed for the user at this point. Mail was still landing in the old mailbox.
Day two: a bad connection changes the plan
The plan was to connect to the user’s PC remotely and bring the mailbox across from there. Two things got in the way.
First, the antivirus on the PC blocked our remote support tool. We got on with Windows’ built-in Quick Assist instead, added an exclusion, installed our tool and carried on.
Second, the office’s primary internet connection was down and the PC was running off a phone hotspot. That’s no way to pull down a whole mailbox. So we connected to the old mailbox from a separate, sandboxed PC of ours, exported the mail there, and let our connection do the heavy lifting.
Building the new mailbox
With the mail exported, we:
- added a Microsoft 365 Business Standard licence
- set up the DNS records for Exchange Online, plus SPF, DKIM and DMARC
- created the mailbox and imported the exported mail
- exported the calendar from the PC and imported that as well
One snag slowed things down. The new mailbox took longer than it should have to provision, and when we looked into it, the email address was also attached to a personal Microsoft account. If you’ve ever signed up for a Microsoft service using your work address, that’s worth knowing about before a move.
The last step was a remote session to set up a fresh Outlook profile and get email and calendar working on the user’s iPhone.
Where they landed
Email now runs in the business’s own Microsoft 365 tenant, with its mail and calendar history brought across and email authentication records in place for the domain. We closed the job as complete a week and a half after it opened.
Is your email with your registrar?
Log in to wherever you bought your domain and look at what’s on the account. If there’s an email or Exchange product listed, your mailboxes probably live there.
While you’re at it, ask whoever manages your email whether SPF, DKIM and DMARC are all set up. Microsoft’s guidance on email authentication says the three work together, and that “anything less than all of the email authentication methods results in substandard protection”.
If you find your email sitting with your registrar and want to talk about moving it, get in touch.