How to migrate emails between two cPanel accounts at Hostinger

Updated 1 week ago

 

Objective: Transfer email data from one cPanel account to another, ensuring all mailboxes, settings, and messages remain intact.

📌 Applies to: Users transferring email data between cPanel hosting accounts.
Note: This is a manual method and can only be performed by the user.

What You’ll Need Before You Start

Step 1 – Prepare the Backup in the Source cPanel

  1. Access File Manager in the source cPanel account.
  2. Navigate to the root directory: 
    /home/your-username/
  3. Locate the mail and etc folders.

    💡 If you don’t see them, click the Settings button (top-right) and enable Show Hidden Files (dotfiles).

  4. Right-click on each folder → Compress → Choose Zip Archive → Confirm compression.
    • First compress mail
    • Then compress etc
  5. Right-click on each .zip file and download them to your computer.

Step 2 – Restore the Backup in the Destination cPanel

  1. In the destination cPanel, make sure your domain is added (check under Domains section).
  2. Open File Manager and go to: 
    /home/your-username/

    (Optional): If mail or etc folders already exist, and you want to override them, rename them to mail-OFF and etc-OFF for backup.

  3. Upload etc.zip and mail.zip to the File Manager.
  4. Extract both mail.zip and etc.zip files.
  5. If the folder structure looks like /etc/etc or /mail/mail, move the contents to the correct root-level folders:/home/your-username/mail and /home/your-username/etc

  6. Delete the now-empty etc and mail folders.

Step 3 – Confirm Migration Success

  1. Go to Email Accounts in your destination cPanel.
  2. You should see the email addresses listed. Try logging into one via Webmail to verify email data is accessible.

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