Canadian Exchange Email Hosting

For optimal deliver-ability it is recommended to use only one email service at a time per domain.

Our Exchange hosting service can be configured in such a way that any email sent to accounts which are not found in the Exchange mail system (but which are still part of your domain) will pass through to an alternate mail hosting service, such as email accounts configured in our shared Plesk hosting.

However, our shared Plesk hosting email service always defaults to local mail delivery for optimal security. As a result of this, messages being sent from a Plesk hosted mail account will likely not reach those hosted in the Exchange system and will bounce instead.

That said, if you use another external mail system that 100% supports split domain mail accounts, then you can indeed use our Exchange hosting for just one or two mail accounts while retaining the use of your 3rd party mail hosting service for others.

But please note that we will not provide support for this configuration as any issues that arise as a result of it are strictly the responsibility of your external mail hosting provider.

An alternative to splitting your mail hosting on one domain is to use two separate domains or a subdomain. For example, you could use this configuration:

• john@mydomain.com - Exchange hosting service
• jenny@mail.mydomain.com - Other hosting service
• francine@mydomain.net - Other hosting service

Which avoids the deliverability issues by allowing you to configure the DNS settings for each of the domains and subdomains separately.

Just outside of Montreal, Quebec, Canada

No, the full Exchange admin panel is not available to you. You can use our Client Centre to:

• Add your domain(s) and validate via DNS record creation
• Create, edit, remove email accounts; aliases; distribution groups; and shared accounts.
• Configure global spam settings
• View your storage usage
• + More...

Yes!

With our shared hosting email accounts, you are required to use very strong 16 character passwords with symbols and numbers as this password strength limit can only be configured per-server and must remain very strong.

However with Exchange hosting you are able to configure your domain's password strength limit to whatever value you like from directly within our Client Centre.

Note that we do still recommend keeping your password strength high for optimal security.

Our Exchange provisioning process is manual, and as such it can take up to 24 hours (Mon-Fri) for the account to be provisioned.

If you opt for our managed account setup and MailMigrator service it can take an additional 1-3 days (not limited to weekdays) after provisioning for the setup and migration to be completed, depending on the quantity of mail and number of accounts.

No. Unfortunately subscriptions to external calendars is not supported and if you were to add an external calendar URL to Outlook Web Access, it would not retrieve any calendar events. It will remain empty.

Aside from the initial account setup and DNS validation portion, our MailMigrator  process works in four parts:

1. Create mail accounts and complete initial data migration from either IMAP or Exchange source
2. You confirm that everything looks good in Outlook Web Access
3. We complete the DNS changes to route all new messages to the Exchange servers
4. 24 hours later, we complete a final data sync, ensuring any messages delivered to the source mail service are synced over

This means the migration process is as seamless as it can get.

What is not migrated

From Exchange Sources:

When migrating from another Exchange service, everything is expected to be migrated.

From IMAP Sources:

When migrating from a service that you connect to with IMAP, only emails are migrated.

This means contacts, calendars, todo entries, and even IMAP message flags are not migrated to Exchange, though you may be able to export and import contacts and calendars manually, this is beyond the scope of our support.

You can use each of these features within the Exchange system after the migration is complete and those flags will sync across devices, but they cannot be automatically migrated from the source mail provider.

Can I use a PST file?

PST file uploads are possible, however it's not possible to do it in multiple passes, so the mail loss redundancy of the above process is not possible.

No, technically your email service won't be down during migration, but you will experience a 24 hour period where messages will either be delivered to the source mail server or your Exchange service with us, until we complete the final sync.

Messages sent from major providers, like Google and Microsoft, should switch over to Exchange pretty fast as they usually have a short DNS refresh period.

During that 24 hours you could either:

1. Check both the source mail provider's webmail and Outlook Web Access for incoming messages, or
2. You could ignore your email for the 24 hours, if you find that simpler.