To migrate email from Bluehost to Office 365, you have three ways. Via desktop email clients, using the Admin Center import mechanism, or a professional tool like SysTools IMAP to IMAP Migration Software. I will explain each method with proper steps and provide tips to smoothly migrate. Before starting your process, you must have a CSV file for mapping, enable the IMAP protocol, generate a Bluehost app password (if Two-Factor Authentication is enabled), and back up your emails before you go through the process.
Table of Contents
- Why Users Want to Migrate From Bluehost to Office 365?
- Manual Method to Migrate Bluehost to Office 365 Using the Exchange Admin Center
- Limitations of Above Method
- Use Desktop Email Client to migrate Bluehost email to Office 365
- How to Migrate Bluehost Email to Office 365? Expert-Recommended Way
- List of Features that the Tool Offers
- Step-by-Step Software Guide to Migrate Email from Bluehost to Office 365
- What to do After Migrating Bluehost to Office 365
- Conclusion
- FAQs
Why Users Want to Migrate From Bluehost to Office 365?
There are a number of reasons for users to migrate from Bluehost to Office 365; some of the noteworthy reasons are mentioned below.
- Office 365 offers a suite of collaborative tools like Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, Outlook, and OneDrive. This enables streamlined teamwork and document sharing among users. This collaborative environment often beats Bluehost’s capabilities.
- Businesses always look for solutions that can easily accommodate their ever-changing business needs. Microsoft 365 is the most secure and scalable platform. This scalability and other potential limitations lead you to migrate to Office 365 from Bluehost.
- Office 365 is backed by Microsoft’s renowned reliability and robust infrastructure. This offers high business uptime, which ensures consistent access to all its services. This is a main factor that Bluehost always lacks.
- Office 365 is packed with great features that completely change the way users work with their daily communications. It does a really great job of stopping spam emails, provides better security, and helps keep things organized. These small but important things can be better than what you get on Bluehost’s email.
- Integrated software suite – Microsoft 365 is a comprehensive business productivity suite when compared with Bluehost. It comes with apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneDrive, etc. All of these integrate seamlessly with secure cloud storage. These integrations usually top the overall experience users find with Bluehost.
Before you begin, collect all these details. These will be important for every method that is going to be discussed here.
- Admin access to your Microsoft 365 account (with licenses assigned to users)
- IMAP is enabled on your Bluehost account
- Bluehost IMAP server details: imap.bluehost.com / Port 993 (SSL)
- Your Bluehost email address and password
- Outgoing: smtp.bluehost.com / Port 465 (SSL)
Like this user, there might be other users who are looking for a solution to migrate from the Bluehost platform. But, unfortunately, there is no direct, feasible manual way available for this migration. However, there are workarounds that can help you.
Manual Method to Migrate Bluehost to Office 365 Using the Exchange Admin Center
To move your Bluehost emails to Microsoft 365, you can use the IMAP protocol. Office 365 provides a native option to move your mailbox. For this, you must have proper user accounts in the destination, create a CSV mapping file, correct Bluehost settings, and backup your emails first before you start the process.
- First, prepare your Bluehost mailbox. Review your emails and remove those that are unnecessary or duplicate. Also, note down the IMAP settings.
- Then, make sure you have proper administrator access to Microsoft 365 to transfer your data. Also, make sure the destination must have the same user account as the source and must have the appropriate license.
- In your spreadsheet, create a source email header and a destination header for mapping. Add the details of your users and then save it for later use.
- Now, create the IMAP migration endpoint by signing in to the Microsoft 365 admin center.
- Find the migration endpoint option and provide Bluehost IMAP server details.
- After creating the endpoint. Create a new migration batch and select the IMAP migration option.
- Upload the CSV that contains the source and destination. Then, click the Migration button.
- Keep track of the migration. Once your mailboxes are properly migrated. Update the DNS to establish the workflow.
Note: After successful verification, you can terminate the migration batch and disconnect from Bluehost’s email service.
Limitations of the Above Method
- The CSV file for migration must be in the correct format, which can be prone to errors.
- Additionally, it involves manual steps and pre-planning, lacking guaranteed success.
- The process is complex for non-technical users.
- It is a time-consuming and daunting task to perform.
Use Desktop Email Client to migrate Bluehost email to Office 365
Every PC and Mac comes with a preinstalled email client in the form of Outlook and Apple Mail, respectively. Moreover, there are a ton of open source options, like Thunderbird, that you can install on your machine. After that, connect both Bluehost and M365 accounts and manually drag and drop emails between the two. Continue this until all emails are in their intended account.
This method might sound simple at first, but configuring accounts in a client that you have never used before can feel complicated. Moreover, the drag-and-drop is not foolproof; missing emails, duplicates, and sync delays are common complaints.
How to Migrate Bluehost Email to Office 365? Expert-Recommended Way
Both manual methods are free to use, but many individual users may have issues transferring their Bluehost mailbox. Also, most professionals don’t prefer this method. Because it requires a lot of time and is not a secure solution to move their emails.
But software like SysTools can easily transfer any IMAP emails to Office 365 account. You don’t need an email client to configure your account, as it is a standalone tool. Also, with this, you can transfer bulk emails and selective migration using the Date Filter. To know how this works, follow the steps below.
List of Features that the Tool Offers
Technically, this software has so much to offer to its users, but here we are sharing a few advantages of the tool-
- This software support bulk Bluehost to Office 365 migration in one go without any data manipulation.
- Moreover, this tool is functional with different versions of the Windows operating system. So, in short, this tool includes Windows Server 2012 / 2016 and Windows 10 / 11 (64-bit) versions.
- Every user has crucial data that they want to keep private and secure. Therefore, this tool offers a facility to all users to migrate email from Bluehost to Office 365. And during or after migration, the tool only provides results with the same formatting or email properties.
- After completion of the migration, if you need a report, then this tool generates one for you. You can save it on your local computer for future reference.
- Besides this, it even has a concurrent migration facility that allows users to transfer Bluehost email data to different Office 365 accounts simultaneously. However, you can even set the priority as per your needs to transfer Bluehost emails of the selected accounts first.
Step-by-Step Software Guide to Migrate Email from Bluehost to Office 365
First of all, download the software on your PC, and follow the guidelines below as stated-
- After installing the tool, run the software on a supported Windows machine. After that, from the home screen, select the IMAP option as a source and the Office 365 option as a destination from the software pane.

- From the section below, mark the Email checkbox to have all Bluehost emails with attachments. You can even check the Date Filter button to set the date range for Bluehost to Office 365 migration selectively.

- Thereafter, you will need to select the Other option as an IMAP host server and provide your Bluehost user account details for validation.

- Now, from the next screen, select the Office 365 option as the IMAP destination account, provide a user ID and password to validate, and click Next.

- At last, fetch the Users as necessary and click on the Start Migration button to begin the process of migrating Bluehost email to the Office 365 account.

What to do After Migrating Bluehost to Office 365
Shifting email data is only half the job. Unless you make updates to the MX records, the email will keep delivering to the old Bluehost. To point them towards O365, follow this final checklist.
- Log in to Bluehost’s DNS control pane and update the current MX records with the ones present in M365. Note, this change will not happen instantaneously; you will have to wait at least 48 hours for the propagation to complete. If at that time any email is sent to your account, it won’t be delivered to your account. So set up a temporary hold where you can receive emails, then redistribute them in the accounts later.
- Like DNS, you must also update the CNAME and TXT records. Without those details, the Outlook client won’t be able to Autodiscover email settings, and you won’t be able to send any outbound emails, as every email you send will be flagged as spam.
- Ask users to test email delivery and troubleshoot any issues. Follow this by moving all of the contacts and calendars. The methods that I have described in this post are only for email data. For the rest of the data workloads, you have to use different means.
- Once you are positive that all the data is shifted, then it’s time to turn off the source Bluehost completely. Decommission it and dispose of the hardware as per the standard security practices.
Conclusion
In this article, we have shared the solution to migrate Bluehost email to an Office 365 account in a systematic manner. However, not every user can do this task manually. So, we have suggested the best solution for secure migration. Using professional software makes it easy to transfer all emails from Bluehost to Microsoft 365 directly.
FAQs
Q- How do I migrate email from Bluehost to Office 365?
Follow the 5 steps below to perform a Bluehost to Office 365 migration:
- Step 1. Download the tool on your computer.
- Step 2. Select IMAP & Office 365 platforms.
- Step 3. Choose Email & Apply Date Filter.
- Step 4. Validate with Source & Destination
- Step 5. Click on Start Migration.
Q- Does this tool move multiple Bluehost email attachments to Microsoft 365?
Yes, it is advanced software that allows for the transfer of multiple emails with attachments from the source account to the destination.
Q- How do I migrate Bluehost email to an Office 365 account for 2 years only?
Using the built-in date filter, you can easily select the required period to migrate emails from your Bluehost account to your required Microsoft 365 account.
Read More: How to Migrate JangoMail to Office 365 Mailbox Securely?