Migration · 5 min read
Moving from personal Gmail to a business domain (without losing anything)
Done well, the team barely notices. Done badly, you lose ten years of email history.
A surprising number of small organisations still run on personal email accounts, alex.smith.charity@gmail.com rather than alex@yourcharity.org.uk. It's understandable: it grew organically and changing it sounds painful.
It is fixable, and it isn't painful when planned properly. Here's the rough shape of how I do it.
Why bother
- Credibility. A proper domain email signals you're a real organisation.
- Ownership. When staff leave, their work email and history belong to the organisation, not them.
- Security. You can enforce MFA, password policy and conditional access centrally.
- Continuity. No more "I can't find that email, try Sarah, she had a copy".
- Funder and client expectations. Many won't take a generic Gmail seriously.
The order matters
The single biggest cause of pain in these projects is doing things in the wrong order. The right sequence is:
1. Buy the domain (or take ownership if it already exists). 2. Set up the new platform (Google Workspace or Microsoft 365) and create user mailboxes. 3. Migrate historical email from the old accounts into the new mailboxes, in the background, while the old accounts still work. 4. Migrate contacts and calendars the same way. 5. Switch the domain's MX records so new email arrives at the new platform. 6. Set up forwarding from the old personal accounts for a long tail of stragglers. 7. Update signatures, business cards, website, social profiles to the new address. 8. Tell key contacts with a short, clear announcement.
Each step has a clean rollback if something goes wrong. At no point is the team locked out of either system.
What gets migrated
- All email history (years of it, including attachments and folders).
- All contacts.
- All calendars and recurring events.
- Shared mailboxes and aliases (info@, hello@, hr@, etc.).
- Distribution lists.
What doesn't migrate automatically: anything stored in third-party tools tied to the old personal address (Canva, Mailchimp, banking, Companies House). Those need updating one by one, which is its own checklist.
How long it takes
For a team of 5–10 people, plan on 1–2 weeks of background migration, then a single planned cutover evening or weekend. The team usually arrives the next morning to find everything in the right place, with their full history intact.
If you'd like me to handle a migration for your organisation, get in touch.
Need a hand with this?
I help small organisations across the UK with exactly this kind of work. Honest advice, plain English, no pressure.
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