Once again I went to sleep and woke up super early, at around 7:20. This sucks, I need my fairly-bad-but-decent sleep schedule back!!!
I don’t even know why, but for some reason I’ve decided to finally ██████████████████████████, thus starting the Nekoweb to Kicya transfer. I had to write and submit another form (grrrr how tired I am of these…), but after a hour I figured everything out and set █████████████ up.
Well, now that that was done, I could finally add «Kicya LLC» to Nekoweb’s ToS. I also switched the servers to company-owned account. Adding LLC to terms made me a little sad for some reason. Like a bit of soul was taken, albeit it’s clear that at this scale you can’t operate it as a personal project anymore.
Rest of the night I spent switching email server to the new one. I’ve been running iRedMail for 2 years now, and I finally reached the point when most email services finally stopped sending my mails to spam by default. So my current IP is extremely valuable, but… iRedMail really sucks. I have to constantly use SQL just to edit email forwards and it practically has no admin panel.
I’ve been long wanting to switch to something like Mailcow. Also I’ve been running the server on email.dimden.dev hostname all this time, which is obviously not really acceptable for business mail anymore.
I’ve decided to take everything step by step. I got a new VPS on Hetzner, and went through the Mailcow installation without setting up any DNS stuff yet. It was pretty simple to install, which was nice.
I then added all my domains, and exported DKIM private keys from the old server and imported them into Mailcow. I verified that the generated DKIM record still matches my current DNS.
I then proceeded to create the mailboxes. My old server has a ton of these and was quite messy and I just kept adding random accounts and forwards to each other. This time, since it’s a fresh start I could finally set everything up nicely and properly. After making the mailboxes I created a ton of aliases for all the emails in use.
I then used imapsync to transfer all emails from old mailboxes to new ones. It was surprisingly easy and nice to use. Literally no errors during actual runs (except for the installation, which still wasn’t very difficult). I also used a few filters to transfer different emails, since I split up some mailboxes.
I really hated the default Webmail service (SOGo), so I installed my beloved Roundcube back. So much better…
And it was finally time to switch stuff over. A few hours before this, I changed all MX record’s TTL to be 5 minutes to make the switch as quick as possible. As I said before, I didn’t plan on giving up my treasured IPs. I stopped both of the servers, and unassigned their IPs while keeping them protected on Hetzner. I then just swapped IPs around. I switched all MX records to my new email host, and set up new PTR record.
I then turned the server back on, and tested if emails are still working good and pass all checks, which they did. I switched the email host on all my services, and it was finally done. Now I have an actually good email deployment without losing all the reputation I’ve built with my old IP.