Migrate Cogeco Email to Microsoft 365 Step by Step

Have you had enough with your Cogeco mail and want to change to a better service? It’s easier than you think. Read my guide and migrate Cogeco email to Microsoft 365 the right way.

Here you will find a variety of working solutions along with a suitable professional product for a fast and error-free response.

Let’s start by listing all the reasons that people give for choosing O365 over a regional email provider like Cogeco.

Why People Choose M365 over Cogeco?

One of the most common reasons is storage. Even on the free tier of M365, you get 15 GB of storage. Cogeco just allows 1 GB of mailbox storage.

With the new AI advancements, people’s mailboxes have become smart assistants. Microsoft is leading from the front with its Copilot, while Cogeco is still stuck in an archaic era.

With M365, you get full access to a business suite. No such offering exists with the Cogeco account.

They might want to break out of an ISP-dependent email account. When you do that, don’t forget to change the email address in ChatGPT and wherever else you used your original account

All these reasons make users quit Cogeco in favor of Office 365. So let’s discuss the methods you can use one by one.

Forward Cogeco to Office 365 Manually

If you start forwarding messages en masse out of the blue, Microsoft might flag this as a spamming attempt. So it can block messages from your Cogeco account and may even blacklist it. To prevent this from happening, you should whitelist your email in Outlook 365.

• Step 1. Sign in to your Cogeco email account.
• Step 2. Click on a message to open it.
• Step 3. Click on the right-pointing forward arrow (located at both the top ribbon as well as the bottom part of your screen).
• Step 4. Type the email address where you want to send this email.
• Step 5. Hit Shift + Enter or press send.

AutoForward Email Messages from Cogeco to M365

If you want to automate the forwarding process, you can do so. Follow these steps:

• Step 1. Log in to Cogeco webmail.
• Step 2. Click on the Cog/Gear icon in the top left and select Settings.
• Step 3. In the Settings dashboard, go to the Accounts tab.
• Step 4. Make sure you select the correct source address (Cogeco allows multiple accounts).
• Step 5. Then, type your M365 email address in the “Forward your mail to another account” field and click Add.
• Step 6. You can forward messages to more than one Office 365 account. Just type the account name and press Add.
• Step 7. Cogeco Mail’s basic settings are to keep all emails in your @cogeco.ca inbox. To change this behavior, uncheck the “Keep a copy here” option. Note that this would delete the message from the source account after it’s forwarded.
• Step 8. Once done, press Save.

An important point to consider is that the auto-forwarding only applies to upcoming messages. So, you need to shift all the emails that are already in your inbox.

If you still use Cogeco in classic mode, the steps change a bit.

You need to go to Preferences, then choose Mail, and after that, use Receiving Messages. Type the forwarding address in the space below. Message Arrival: Forward a copy to the area.

Use Microsoft’s Admin Portal to Pull Cogeco Emails

If you have access to the M365 admin center, you can use it to bring in all the emails. Here are the steps you need to follow:

Step 1. Get your Cogeco IMAP server details. Depending on your location, the server URL might vary a bit, so check and use the data carefully.

Step 2. Then create a CSV template with these column headers: EmailAddress (the Microsoft 365 address), UserName (source sign-in name), and Password (the user’s password or superuser admin credentials). And populate it with all the details.

Step 3. Open Exchange Admin Center, go to Migration, then Endpoints, and add a new IMAP endpoint.

Step 4. While still in the EAC, add a migration batch. Pick IMAP, add the CSV. Adjust the various settings, schedule the batch, and run it.

Step 5. Update your domain’s MX records at your DNS provider to point to Microsoft 365. You might want to lower the DNS TTL so that there are no delivery delays.

Step 6. Wait for 48-72 hours for DNS propagation to complete, then delete the migration batch in the EAC to permanently stop the background sync.

Use a Desktop-Based Email Client

On your Windows PC, you can find the Outlook client pre-installed, and connect both Cogeco and the M365 account.

Then grab a group of messages from the source side and drop them into the destination.

Repeat till you move every message.

This process is highly error-prone, and if you are not careful, you may miss out on an email or create duplicates. Moreover, you have no way of knowing how much data has moved and how much is left. You are entirely on your own. So, it’s better to use another more professional method.

Professional Solution to Migrate Cogeco Email to Office 365

Use SysTools IMAP to Office 365 Migration Software to get every email message from your Cogeco account to the M365 cloud. This tool uses OAuth for enterprise-grade security without compromising on the speed with which the transfer takes place.

Download Tool Purchase Now

The entire control is in your hands with the concurrency toggle, date filter, and user selection pane. With the free trial, test out all features today.

Steps to Use the Tool on Your Machine

Step 1. Download a copy on any computer running Windows 10, 11, or Windows Server 2016 and later. Choose IMAP as the source and Office 365 as the destination. Select the email workload and apply the date filter if need be. Press Next to continue.

Step 2. On the source screen, choose others from the dropdown list. Enter your Cogeco details and validate.

Step 3. Likewise, for the Destination type, the M365 application ID and admin name. Validate and proceed ahead by pressing Next.

Step 4. Complete user mapping with the help of the CSV Template.

Step 5. Check the user list, validate, and press Start.

Conclusion

Now you know how to migrate Cogeco email to Office 365. With this step-by-step guide, it was my intention to make the entire process of email transfer between Cogeco and M365 super simple. Despite the presence of manual methods, it is not recommended to use them; instead, you are much better off in terms of both data safety and migration speed if you choose the professional tool.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How much time will it take to shift all of my Cogeco emails to O365?

There is no fixed timeline for everyone. Your total duration depends on multiple factors, the most important of which are the overall data volume and your network speed. The tool offered here contains a concurrency slider function to make the transfer optimal for your situation.

Q: Is the transfer a two-way sync between Cogeco and Office 365?

No, it’s a one-way transfer. All emails from Cogeco get transported to O365, but any changes you make in the emails on the destination O365 accounts will remain there, i.e., it won’t transfer to the source Cogeco server.