Is there a way that any providers use, a standardised way, to create a lot of new email accounts.
I'm moving a few domains' email accounts from one supplier (Siteground, their recurring fees are huge) to another (Fastmail, or maybe Office 365, [ProtonMail only allow multi-domains on their expensive professional account]) but I'm not looking forward to moving about 20-50 accounts, per domain, from one email system to another [the domains are staying put, web hosting is being handled separately, just the email accounts are moving].
Is there an easier way? Do any providers support it?
I'm not relishing manually setting up even just a handful of domains with lists of redirects and mailboxes for all my family members and the couple of small businesses I've been managing. If I decide a month down the line it's not working, it seems a lot to go through to move all the "domains" again (i.e. setup email accounts at another provider that use my domains and have named email addresses -- eg person.1@example.com, person.one@example.com, nickname1@example.com, ... etc., and then all those for example2.com, example3.com, example4.com, each set of email addresses going to a single person).
There seems to be a lot of lock-in because of the difficulty of moving email accounts. Am I doing it wrong? Should I just relent and try and use catch-alls and filter it client side? Any advice?
I host my own email servers, so when people are migrating accounts in, what I've done is set up their accounts to use fetchmail to fetch email from the previous provider when the previous provider offers no direct access.
Some providers can allow you direct access to your mail spool file, so rsyncing that across is easiest.
If you set the TTL on DNS to really low, like half an hour, a week before the actual move, you'll have a very small window in which email might go to either the new place or the old place. There are ways to make sure there's absolutely no overlap, if that's a big deal, but for most things this works just fine.
If the email mostly lives on the client and you don't care about syncing mailboxes on the server, just configure the email clients to check both the old and new servers for a few days, then remove the old server when you're 100% sure nothing is going there any more.