Recovery Steps (continued)

6) Renaming the mailbox on your Apple iOS device

This applies to Apple iPhones and Apple iPads.

Before you set up your mail account on your mobile device, we recommend renaming the existing mailbox first.  In case something goes wrong during the setup of the new account, you won’t lose the old messages.

Perform these steps for each mailbox you have on your Apple iOS device.

1. Go into your device Settings.
2. Tap the Passwords & Accounts option.
3. Tap the entry for an existing mailbox in the list.
4. Look for the IMAP section, and tap the Account entry.
5. On the Account screen that appears, look for the IMAP ACCOUNT INFORMATION section and modify the Description field to have the word “BACKUP” at the end.  For example:
   • Before:   “My Work Email”
   • After:   “My Work Email BACKUP”
6. Look for the INCOMING MAIL SERVER section, and modify the Host Name field to be the following:
   oldimap.naci.ca
   (Use this exact server name!)
7. Tap Done.
8. Close your mail application.
9. Open your mail application.  You should now see the old mailboxes labelled with the “BACKUP” suffix.

Your device may try to validate the settings with the server.   It will fail – but that’s okay.  Simply tap OK or Accept or Yes until the device eventually saves the settings.

It may also warn you that you will be unable to send or receive email from this account.  That’s okay.

IMPORTANT:  The old mail account may prompt you for a new password.  DO NOT type in the current password for the new account that was created.  If you do, there is a good chance all of the mail in the backup mailbox will be wiped out!

Recovery Steps (continued)

5) Restoring email from the “BACKUP”

These instructions assume you have already completed the following steps:

Step 2 – Export the contents of your Mail File
Step 4 – Set up the new account on the computer

If you did not perform step 2, you can go back and do it now.  Once that step is complete, come back to this page and follow the instructions below.

Perform the following steps for each account that has been set up on a computer.  If the account is used on more than one computer, do this restore process on only ONE of the computers!

♦ ♦ ♦ WARNING ♦ ♦ ♦
Doing these steps on more than one computer for a given mailbox
will result in many duplicate emails in the mailbox!
♦ ♦ ♦ WARNING ♦ ♦ ♦

 Click the link to show the steps specific to the version of MS Outlook you are using. 

This guide takes you step-by-step through the process of setting up a new email account in Outlook 2016 or Outlook for Office 365.

Note: This guide defaults to IMAP and No SSL.

1. Launch Outlook
2. Select File on the top left menu bar
   
3. Select the Add Account button in the middle of the screen, then Account Settings
   
   
4. Enter your email address
5. Select Advanced options, then select Let me set up my account manually
   
   
6. Click Connect
7. This temporary screen will display
   
8. This screen will display the various account options – select IMAP
   
   
9. Server Settings:
   • For Incoming mail, type “imap.“, then your domain name
     • Set the encryption method to None
     • Leave Secure Password Authentication (SPA) unticked!
   • For Outgoing mail, type “smtp.“, then your domain name
     • Change the port to 587
     • Set the encryption method to None
     • Leave Secure Password Authentication (SPA) unticked!
10. Your settings should look something like this:
11. Click Connect
12. You will now be prompted for the password – go ahead and enter it:
    
13. Your setup is complete!
    

Recovery Steps (continued)

4) Set up the new account on the computer

Once you have been provided the new password for each of the email addresses backed up in the previous steps, you must create new accounts in Microsoft Outlook for each of the email addresses.

View online, or download and print this handy guide to setting up email accounts in Microsoft Outlook:

Add New Mail Account

Although it is written for Outlook 2010, it’s very similar for newer versions of Microsoft Outlook – plus it has all of the key information you will need.

Outlook 2016 Users – Click here!

Do not, under any circumstances, enter your new password into the old Microsoft Outlook account that you modified in Step #1.  Doing so will erase the contents of the backup Mail File that you just created!

Also, do not update any of your mobile devices at this time either!

You will start receiving email into this new Inbox as soon as we release them from the holding area.

After the Account has been created…

Once the new account has been set up, the old account may ask you to provide a user id and password to log in somewhere.  Should that happen, simply click “Cancel” until it goes away.  To stop it from prompting you completely, follow these steps:

In Microsoft Outlook 2010 or newer:

• Click on “Send / Receive”.
• Locate the option “Send/Receive Groups” and click on it.
• Choose “Define Send/Receive Groups…”.
• Highlight the group called “All Accounts” and click the Edit button.
• Click on the Account to select it.
  • Look for the account to have the special “BACKUP” folder under the Folder Options.  If it does not, you probably highlighted the wrong one.
• Uncheck the “Include the selected account in this group” setting (and make sure again that the account has the right folder structure – the “BACKUP” one):
  
• Click OK.
• Click Close.

You may have to close Outlook and reopen it in order for the prompting to stop completely.

Setting your new account as the default

Once your new account is set up it will receive all new email coming in from the internet.  However, Outlook still thinks the “BACKUP” account is the one where you do all your work.  This is not what you want.  You need to tell Outlook where your “good” account is.

NOTE:  If you have multiple accounts set up in your Outlook, you have to decide and choose only one account that will become the “Default” account for sending mail.  Make the following changes to that account only:

Restoring email from the “BACKUP”

Once we have verified that mail is flowing normally, we will send out instructions to guide you through the final recovery steps necessary to merge the “BACKUP” Mail File into the new mailbox.

Recovery Steps

Please perform the following steps in order to safely back up your emails and connect to the new mailbox.

♦♦♦ REMINDER ♦♦♦
The steps on this page need to be done for every email account on the computer.

1) Rename the existing account on the computer

For Microsoft Outlook 2010 or newer:

• Click on File, Account Settings, Account Settings.
• A list of your accounts will appear on the “E-Mail” tab.
• Choose an email account.
• Click the “Change…” button.  The following dialog will appear:
  
• Modify the “User Name” to say exactly this:  old-account@nowhere.com
  >>> THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT!
• Uncheck the “Remember password” option.
  >>> THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT!
• Your settings should look like this:
  
• Change the option “Test Account Settings by clicking the Next button” to be unchecked if it is checked!
• Click on the “More Settings…” button and make sure you’re on the “General” tab.
• Modify the name in the first field to have the word “BACKUP” at the end:
  
• Click OK.
• Click “Next >”.
• Click “Finish”.
• Click “Close”.

The email folders in the left pane of Microsoft Outlook will now reflect that it is a “BACKUP” folder.

DO NOT modify or delete anything in this “Backup” folder until well after the recovery process is complete!

2) Export the contents of your Mail File

This is not a mandatory step, but is highly recommended to make a second backup of your mail file in case something goes wrong later.

In Microsoft Outlook 2010 or newer:

• Click on File, Options, and then finally on Advanced.
  
• Look for the “Export’ button on the right side of the window and click it.  The Import and Export Wizard will start.
• Choose Export to a file, then click “Next >”:
  
• Choose Outlook Data File (.pst), then click “Next>”:
  
• When prompted to select the folder to export from, locate the one with the word “BACKUP” on the end (from step 1) and click on the name at the highest level:
  
  Also ensure the “Include Subfolders” option is checked!
• Click “Next >”.
• On the final window, click “Browse” and go to your Desktop.  Type in a name for the file and click OK.  You should see something like this when you are done:
  
• Click “Finish”.

You will be prompted to enter a password for the file – just click OK without entering anything!

Depending on how much email you have in your Inbox, it may take some time to make a copy of your Mail File.  However, once done, you will have made a backup of your Mail File that can be used for import later.

If you see errors from Microsoft Outlook during the process, not all email items may have been saved.  Repeat the process and overwrite the backup file.  If the problem persists, contact your local desktop technician for assistance as they may be able to determine the reason.

3) Obtain your new Mailbox Password

Call our office at 204-809-9606 or call/text us at 204-797-4335.
We will confirm who you are and will provide you with a new password for the mailbox.

Once you have received your new password for your mailbox and are ready to set up the account again in Microsoft Outlook, go to this post:  Mail Server Account Creation

On Tuesday, February 4, 2019 at just after midnight, we experienced a catastrophic event in our Winnipeg data centers.  This affected both our corporate network and email servers, as well as our on-premise backups.

Email servers that route mail through our network, mailbox servers and spam filtering all experienced catastrophic and unrecoverable failures.  As a result, we had to rebuild all of the servers from scratch using what we could from offsite backups.

The servers are now back up and receiving email from the internet, but we are presently holding it back until all of our clients have created a Microsoft Outlook backup for each of their email addresses.

Before we can let you access your new mailbox, you must back up the data for each email address from at least one computer that has access to each email address.  If you have multiple email addresses on one computer, the recovery instructions will need to be done for every email address on that computer.

At this time, do not make any changes to email settings set up on a mobile device or tablet until you have backed up your mailbox on a computer with Microsoft Outlook!  Making changes to those devices without backing up on a desktop will lose everything on them!
(We are working on a separate procedure for “phone-only” accounts.)

Failure to back up your email accounts and files for each mailbox will result in permanent loss of all of your email history for those accounts when you connect to the new server!

Locate a computer that has the most recent emails downloaded for each mailbox.  The last emails were received by our servers on Monday evening.  There may have been some messages lost in between Monday evening and Tuesday at midnight if your computers were off.  Unfortunately, those are not retrievable.

Once you are ready to begin the recovery process, go to this post:  Mail Server Outage Recovery