I’ve seen migrations go wrong in a specific, avoidable way. Someone imports their messages first, then updates DNS afterward, and ends up with a gap where new mail arrives at an inbox that’s no longer being checked.
The order these steps happen in matters as much as the steps themselves.
I worked through Hostinger’s Email Import tool directly and mapped out the sequence that avoids that gap, DNS first, credentials second, messages last, along with the parts of this process that trip people up even when they get the order right.
Step 1: Create Your New Mailbox First
Migration moves messages into a mailbox that already exists. It doesn’t create one along the way, so this has to happen before anything else.
If you haven’t set one up yet, our Hostinger email setup guide walks through mailbox creation.
Match your old address exactly if you can, contact@yourdomain.com staying contact@yourdomain.com, so nobody emailing you notices anything changed on their end. If you’re restructuring how your addresses are organized anyway, moving support@olddomain.com into contact@newdomain.com, for instance, that works too.
You’re just importing into a different destination than the original.
Step 2: Recreate Anything Your Old Provider Was Handling For You
This is the step people forget, because it doesn’t feel like part of “migrating email” the way moving messages does. But forwarders, aliases, catch-all addresses, auto-responders, signatures, and filters aren’t stored inside your mailbox; they’re configured on your old provider’s servers as separate settings.
None of that comes along when you import messages.
If your old setup had an alias like info@ routing into your main inbox, or a filter sorting newsletters into a folder automatically, that logic simply doesn’t exist anymore the moment you’re on Hostinger, until you rebuild it yourself. Our guide on Hostinger email forwarding and aliases covers rebuilding that side of things.
I’d actually do this step before touching DNS, not after, so nothing is missing in the gap between switching providers and remembering what needs rebuilding.
Step 3: Point Your Domain’s DNS at Hostinger
Here’s what’s actually happening at this step, since it’s easy to treat DNS as a box to check rather than understand. Your domain’s MX records tell the internet which mail server should receive messages sent to your address. Right now, those records point at your old provider.
Until you change them to point at Hostinger, mail keeps arriving at the old inbox no matter how many messages you’ve already imported into the new one.
Our Hostinger MX records guide covers the exact values.
A domain with two providers’ MX records active at the same time gives receiving mail servers conflicting instructions about where to deliver your mail, and the result isn’t a clean failure you’d notice immediately. It’s mail arriving inconsistently or disappearing without an obvious error anywhere.
Once the old records are gone and the new ones are in, don’t assume they’re live just because you saved the change.
Step 4: Get Your Old Account’s Login Details Ready
To pull your messages over, Hostinger connects to your old mailbox using IMAP, a protocol that lets one mail service read another mailbox’s contents with permission.
For that connection to work, you need three things ready: the old email address, its password, and that provider’s IMAP server address.
That middle item, the password, isn’t as simple as it sounds for two of the biggest providers.
| Provider | What You Actually Need |
|---|---|
| Gmail | Turn on two-factor authentication if it isn’t already, then generate an app password just for this import. Your normal Gmail password will be rejected. |
| Yahoo | Generate an app password through Yahoo’s account security settings, the same idea as Gmail. |
| Most other providers | Your regular account password usually works, though it’s worth checking your provider’s own settings first in case they have a similar requirement. |
Here’s why Gmail and Yahoo both add this extra step: a normal password is meant to only ever be typed into their own login screen.
An app password is a separate, single-purpose credential generated just for one external connection, so if it’s ever compromised, you can revoke that one password without having to change your actual account password everywhere else you use it.
How to Move Your Inbox to Hostinger
Step 5: Run the Import
With DNS confirmed live and your old account’s credentials in hand, the actual import happens in hPanel.
- Go to Emails > Email Import
- Click Import emails
You’ll move through four stages: Prepare for import, Import from, Import to, and Summary. The first screen links directly to Hostinger’s own Gmail and Yahoo walkthroughs if you’re migrating from either, and it states plainly that your login information isn’t stored once the import finishes, worth knowing if you were wondering whether Hostinger keeps hold of your old password afterward. It doesn’t.
On Import from, you’ll enter the old account’s address and password, the app password from Step 4 if you’re coming from Gmail or Yahoo, not the regular login password, then pick its IMAP server from a dropdown instead of typing it manually, which covers most major providers without you needing to look anything up.
I confirmed the full list directly with Hostinger, since the dropdown itself is too long to capture in one screenshot:
| Provider | IMAP Server |
|---|---|
| Hostinger | imap.hostinger.com |
| Gmail (Google) | imap.gmail.com |
| Titan Email | imap.titan.email |
| Locaweb | email-ssl.com.br |
| GoDaddy | imap.secureserver.net |
| UOL Host | imap.uhserver.com |
| KingHost | imap.kinghost.net |
| OVH | ssl0.ovh.net |
| Uni5 Networks | imap.uni5.net |
| IONOS (ES) | imap.ionos.es |
| DreamHost | imap.dreamhost.com |
| iPage | imap.ipage.com |
| One.com | imap.one.com |
| IONOS (UK) | imap.ionos.co.uk |
| MailHostBox | us2.imap.mailhostbox.com |
| Gandi | mail.gandi.net |
| StackMail | imap.stackmail.com |
| IONOS (Global) | imap.ionos.com |
| Rackspace | secure.emailsrvr.com |
| Umbler | imap.umbler.com |
| Namecheap PrivateEmail | mail.privateemail.com |
| IONOS (FR) | imap.ionos.fr |
| Terra | imap.terra.com.br |
| Yandex | imap.yandex.com |
| IONOS (DE) | imap.ionos.de |
| Servicio de Correo | imap.serviciodecorreo.es |
| Zoho Mail | imappro.zoho.com or imap.zoho.com |
| STRATO | imap.strato.com or imap.strato.de |
| iPower | imap.ipower.com |
| GridHost | mail3.gridhost.co.uk |
Not listed? There’s an Other option where you enter the IMAP server manually. Your current provider’s own account settings or support documentation will have it, usually under a heading like “IMAP settings” or “mail client setup.”
After that, Import to asks which Hostinger mailbox receives everything, and Summary gives you one last look before the import actually starts running.
Step 6: Check Your Mailbox Size Against the Import Limit
Hostinger caps each import file at 256 MB. That’s not necessarily your whole mailbox. If your old inbox is genuinely large, with years of attachments and archived threads, you may be looking at multiple files rather than one clean transfer.
If you hit that ceiling, exported mailbox files (commonly in mbox format) can be split into smaller pieces before importing. Check roughly how large your old mailbox actually is before you start, so this doesn’t surprise you mid-migration.
Step 7: Reconfigure Every Device and Client You Actually Use
Once messages are in and DNS has fully propagated, anything that was still pointed at your old provider, your phone’s mail app, a desktop client, a CMS plugin sending notification emails, needs to be manually switched over to Hostinger’s settings.
It won’t update on its own just because the mail moved.
Our Hostinger email setup guide covers the IMAP and SMTP details for this, and our webmail login guide covers the switch if you were checking mail through your old provider’s web interface day to day.
Troubleshooting Common Migration Issues
- Import fails immediately with a login error. For Gmail or Yahoo, confirm you generated and entered an app password rather than typing in the regular account password.
- Import completes but shows almost no messages. Check whether DNS has actually finished propagating, and confirm you selected the correct IMAP server for the source account rather than one with a similar name.
- Mail arrives inconsistently after migration, sometimes at the old inbox, sometimes the new one. This is the classic sign of leftover MX, SPF, or DKIM records from your old provider still sitting in your domain’s DNS alongside Hostinger’s. Go back and remove them.
- Forwarders, aliases, or filters stopped working after the move. These never transfer automatically. They have to be manually rebuilt inside Hostinger, since they lived on your old provider’s servers, not inside your mailbox.
- Import stalls or fails on a large mailbox. You’ve likely hit the 256 MB per-file limit. Split the export into smaller files and import them separately.
The messages are the easy part of a Hostinger email migration. What actually determines whether the move goes cleanly is everything around them. Getting DNS switched over and fully propagated before you rely on the new mailbox, removing old records instead of just adding new ones, rebuilding whatever forwarders or filters your old provider was quietly handling, and having the right kind of password ready before you even reach the import screen.
