A client of ours was utilizing the Media Temple mail server and sought to transition their email services to Google Apps. The migration process involved two primary steps: backing up all email communications and altering the DNS records. Media Temple offers an informative guide on this migration process, titled “How do I migrate email to Google Apps for Work?” Within this article, three distinct methods for email backup are presented:
1. Utilizing the Google Apps Migration Tool
2. CloudTech Mail Migration
3. Manual IMAP Migration
We will delve into CloudTech Mail Migration initially. Media Temple offers a paid service for Google Apps setup, priced at approximately $5.00 per month per mailbox or $50.00 annually. For email backup, they charge $99 for up to 10 mailboxes. Initially, this service seemed appealing; however, further investigation revealed that if our Media Temple hosting is canceled at any point, all mailboxes would be deleted.
A recent chat with Media Temple support clarified this concern:
Coalition: If we obtain Google Apps service, it implies we’ll no longer utilize Media Temple’s Mail server. Therefore, our mailboxes (currently on Media Temple) will be automatically cancelled when you set up Google Apps. And if we cancel the hosting service with Media Temple in the future, it should not impact our email service (which will be on Google Apps).
MT Support: The mailboxes established through us would be removed, and you would need to set up the mailboxes in your existing Google Apps account.
After considering this, we decided against setting up Google Apps through Media Temple. Instead, we chose the Google Apps Migration Tool. We acquired a Google Apps subscription and configured Google email accounts for all users, followed by the migration of emails from Media Temple’s mail server to Google. This process proved more challenging than anticipated, resulting in the following error during migration: “SSL error. SSL certificate may not have been installed properly on the source server. Please verify.”
Our client’s e-commerce site was hosted on Bigcommerce, with the mail server on Media Temple. While SSL was installed on the primary domain, it was necessary to have SSL on the mail server as well (which was on an external server simultaneously). We found more information on Google Support.
We purchased SSL from Media Temple and received an email from GeoTrust for approval, which we promptly approved. The SSL installation process was expected to take 15-20 minutes but extended beyond a day. After acquiring SSL, we requested Media Temple to install it on the mail server, but they only offer this service for domains, not mail servers. Consequently, we decided to perform the installation ourselves.
Follow these steps to install SSL on your mail server:
1. Log in to Plesk Admin.
2. Navigate to Server > Security > SSL Certificates.
3. Obtain two certificates: Default Certificate and Certificate for your mail server (e.g., mail.domain.com).
4. Click the Download icon to download all certificate components, resulting in a file named mail.domain.com.pem.
5. Connect to your server through SSH and go to the /user/share directory.
6. Create a file named mail.domain.com.pem and copy/paste the entire content from the downloaded .pem file into the SSH terminal.
7. Refer to the Media Temple support article and follow the steps from #5, ensuring the TLS_CERTIFICATE Path is set to /user/share/mail.domain.com.pem.
8. After completing all steps, you have successfully installed SSL on your mail server.
Finally, proceed to your Google Apps admin console and utilize the Migration Tool. The process should proceed smoothly.
We appreciate Media Temple’s support article on changing default certificates for SMTP, IMAP, and POP3 over SSL.
