How to Transfer Office 365 Mailbox to Another Account? Best Way Explained

Summary: This technical guide provides detailed information including planning, preparation, and execution stages to move Office 365 mailbox to another user safely. Keep up with it, as the latest development in the migration process will be reflected frequently. 

When talking about the latest technology, Office 365 is the name that comes across. Office 365 is the most prominent cloud platform and has nearly a billion users worldwide. It has become a part of productivity in almost every business industry. And, every single business information, be it emails, contacts, events, etc is shared and stored in Office 365 mailbox.

However, some situations ask for migration of the Microsoft Office 365 mailbox to another user. Let’s understand it through real-life scenarios.

Scenario 1: When a company decides to restructure the existing Admin department and break them into two separate departments such as HR and Accounts. Then, it becomes necessary to move the current Office 365 mailbox data to the newly created user mailbox for smooth operation.

Scenario 2: Sometimes organizations create different types of user accounts for contractors and direct hires with different naming schemes. When a contractor winds up getting hired directly, the company creates a new user account, takes the user mailbox tied to their old contractor account, and transfers it to the newly created user account.

Given the fact that industry-level mailbox migration is quite a complex, tedious, and overwhelming task. It has to go through various stages & requires proper planning and preparation for the seamless execution of the process. Hence, it is suggested to have a complete Microsoft Office 365 migration checklist, before heading toward the migration process.

Let’s cover all the stages of migration in detail.

Stage 1. Plan to Move Office 365 Mailbox to Another User

When you decide to transfer the O365 mailboxes to another Microsoft 365 user, it becomes necessary to plan everything down to the finest detail. Planning will help you identify each goal, who will be responsible for each goal, and last but not least decide the due date for the completion of the migration.

In the planning stage, you must ensure:

1. The scope, timeline, and project tracking mechanism of the migration.
2. You have the success criteria and communication/ training plan.

Apart from the above, you must make key deployment decisions. Such as;

• Analyze your current environment and collect information about the number and size of mailboxes.
• Determine the number of user accounts to be migrated.
• Get the details on your network settings, and file storage location.
• Create source and destination admin accounts for the migration.   

Since all these things you have to consider, it is suggested that you should plan your migration at least 3 days prior to the migration.

Stage 2. Preparation to Transfer Office 365 Mailbox to Another Account

Next comes the step of preparing your organization for migration. This includes:

1. Source & Destination Preparation:

First, set up Microsoft 365 services to work for your organization.

Secondly, ensure that the destination Office 365 has sufficient storage space to save the transferred data from the source.

Next, you must create users’ mailboxes, resource mailboxes, and groups in the destination O365.

2. Schedule Migration:

Prepare a master file including all the source user account mailboxes that need to be migrated.

For that, you can create a CSV file listing all the source and destination users. Later, it will be used to map the users and become helpful in performing a group/batch migration smoothly.

3. Disable Directory Sync:

Make sure to disable the directory sync from the source Office 365 Admin center. This process may take up to 24 hours to reflect. hence, it’s crucial to ensure this before data transfer. 

After that, stop the inbound mail flow. When you do so, the internet servers trying to deliver a new mail will queue the mail and when the migration process completes, it will attempt redelivery after 24 hours.

4. Roll out to Users:

The last but most important step is to make the users aware of the upcoming migration/changes and how they will affect them. 

Stage 3. It is Time to Transfer Office 365 Mailbox to Another Account 

This is arguably the most important step of all because you are going to choose the method for this data migration.

Primarily, you can use either PowerShell or the automated Migrator Wizard Office 365 Migration for executing the migration project.

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Let’s discuss both methods.

#1 Transfer Office 365 Mailbox to Another Account using PowerShell:

The first step is, to connect to Exchange Online.

Connect-ExchangeOnline

After that, an Office 365 login window will pop up. Sign in with the account that is a member of the Discovery Management role. 

Next, log in as a Global Admin and go to Exchange >> Permissions to edit the Discovery Management role.

Further, to move the emails from one mailbox to another run the below command.

Search-Mailbox $sourcemailbox -TagertMailbox $targetmailbox -TargetFolderName $targetfoldername

To copy all the messages to the target mailbox, all three parameters are required. And, the structure goes like this:

TargetFolderName\Date of the search\Primary Mailbox\Inbox

It produces the desired result. However, there is only one limitation i.e. it returns 10,000 results per mailbox. So, for moving a larger mailbox or a larger amount of messages, use the New-ComplianceSearch instead.

Optional: If you want to see how big the mailbox you are dealing with is, then use the -EstimateResultOnly switch. And, it goes like this:

Search-Mailbox $sourcemailbox -EstimateResultOnly

Further, it is also possible to use the -SearchQuery switch to narrow down the messages that you want to migrate, such as subject line, To, or From, etc.

Search-Mailbox $sourcemailbox -SearchQuery “Subject: Today’s Agenda”

Now, let’s move on to the following method.

#2 Move Office 365 Mailboxes to Another User Through The Automated Tool

Many IT experts/admins prefer to take the help of a professional tool to carry out a smooth & error-free migration. 

Below are the software steps:

Step 1. Select the source and destination as ‘Office 365’.

Step 2. Choose all the mailbox items such as Emails, Contacts, Documents, Calendars, and tasks that you want Office 365 copy mailbox to another user, and click Next.

Step 3. Provide correct Admin Email and Application ID for both Source and Destination.

Step 4. Validate all the necessary source and destination permissions for the migration. Then, click Next.

Step 5. Define the users from the source account through various options i.e. Fetch Users, Import Users, or Download Template.

Step 6. Map the source users with the destination users and once again validate the permission.

Step 7. Finally, click on Start Migration to move Office 365 mailbox to another user.

Advanced Features of The Tool: 

• Migrate mailboxes in bulk or perform Office 365 tenant-to-tenant migration.
• With this tool, you can transfer the mailbox data to a shared mailbox as well.
• Based on priority, it allows you to perform an account-based priority migration.
• In addition to that, you can apply a Date Filter to carry out selective data migration.
• For skipped items or newly arrived items, you can use the Re-run migration option.

These are some of the characteristics of the tool and there’s more to it.

Anyway, after performing the migration, the last thing you need to do is to ensure that all the mailboxes that you intended to migrate are at the destination or not.

Also Read: Distribution Group Migration to Office 365 Step By Step Explained

Conclusion

After reading this technical write-up, you must have gotten an idea about the various stages you need to consider to move Office 365 mailboxes to another user. So, if you have a bunch of Office 365 mailboxes to migrate then follow the steps, utilize the tool, and get things done without any data loss or downtime.

FAQs

Q1. Is there any easy way to transfer Office 365 mailbox to another account without using the manual method?

Yes, you can use the above-mentioned software solution to easily move mailbox to another user Office 365 in just 5 steps. 

• Step 1. Install and Launch the Software on the PC.
• Step 2. Choose Office 365 as the Source & Destination. 
• Step 3. Enable Mail Category in Task Load & Set Date Filter.
• Step 4. Validate Source & Destination with Credentials.
• Step 5. Select User Accounts & Click on Start Migration.

Q2. How do I forward the Office 365 email to another email account?

You can follow the below steps, to set forwarding in an Office 365 email account:

• Step 1. Login to Microsoft 365 >> Click Outlook.
• Step 2. Click Settings (gear icon in the upper right-hand of your screen).
• Step 3. Click the Mail icon >> Click Forwarding.
• Step 4. Under the “Forwarding” heading >> select Enable Forwarding.
• Step 5. Type the email address you wish to forward your mail (e.g., Gmail, Hotmail, etc.)
• Step 6. Choose to Keep a copy of all forwarded messages >> click on Save.

Q3. How long can it take to perform mailbox migration in Office 365?

The time it takes to migrate an entire mailbox to another Office 365 user account can vary. It depends upon several factors such as the size of mailboxes, the network bandwidth, and the migration approach you choose. Using the above software for this task gives you an edge over the manual approach.