The storm that went through southern Ontario and Quebec has left RKIL without power, probably until May 28th or so. While we have no electricity at home, we had no injuries or direct damage to the house or vehicle, though it was close.

As a result of the power outage, email services for sites that we host has been interrupted until power can be restored. We apologize for this significant inconvenience.

There has been a plan in place to migrate the services for campbonaventure.com, campbonaventure.ca, thesalmonlodge.com, lesalmonlodge.ca, theclubonthebonaventure.com and leclubsurlabonaventure.ca over to make use of Google Workspace and Gmail. The service for 3Camps.com already runs on Google Workspace, and we have already an emergency migration of crookberg.ca and pkkm.ca yesterday.

The original plan was to migrate these service after this year’s fishing season in order to minimize disruption to normal workflow. However considering the importance of email at this time of year, we are going to do an emergency migration of all the services.

We will collect secondary email addresses (probably your current personal emails) so that we can send you instructions on how to sign in to the new accounts. During the migration, you will have two email systems to deal with, your exisiting email client (Mail, Outlook ..) for your current emails, as well as your new email in a browser. Once the power stabilizes here we will work with you individually to get back to a single place for your emails.

With the new account we recommend the following:

Sign in on your desktops using a web browser (Safari, Chrome, Edge…) instead of connecting using your standard email client (Mail, Outlook …). This will keep all your existing emails that are in folders including your inbox and sent mail in place.
On your mobile devices, you should download and use the Gmail app. This will keep any filed emails on your phone accessible.

Once we have made the conversions we will go through the process of moving your filed emails over to the new clients. This will be done individually to ensure that all your email history will be maintained.

We will do our best to make the migration as smooth as possible.

If you have questions, please reach out to me at Jamie Johnson jamie@rkil.com.

Objectives

Migrate from EIMS to Google Workspace as seamlessly as possible for users - out the window because of power outage and forced move
Allow users to take advantage of Google Workspace either in a browser, or in apps that are local on computer or mobile device.
Provide users with access to all ‘existing’ emails (inbox, stored in folders) from EIMS in Workspace.
The process should be simple for users.

Current Situation

Clients

Computer Client App

Most run on Mac: Mail as app
Some run on Windows: Outlook as app
Most use POP and SMTP: emails stored locally in folders (most probable) or on a network drive (unlikely). Manual process to move, many steps
A few use IMAP and SMTP: Folders stored on server, easy to move
No web browser access from other computers.

Mobile Client App

Runs on either iOS or Android: Probably IMAP, folders stored on server

Server

EIMS - Original Server

Most users are POP, a very few are IMAP
Supports multiple domains
All users are aliases for every domain, i.e. if there is a julia@thesalmonlodge.com, there julia then can pickup email with campbonaventure.com, crookberg.com, newfoundout.com and all other domains on the server.
Reasons to migrate (Issues with being tagged as ransomware or spam because of coming from a small server, limited spam detection, no web browser access, no ability to change passwords for users, issues with hosting stability, issues with remote support for host).

Google Workspace

Almost all users are IMAP, hard to do POP
Supports primary domain, with aliases; and secondary domains without aliases

Statement of the problem

The emergency migration has resulted in ‘existing’ emails being saved in a computer app, while ‘new’ emails are being handled in a browser.
We need a series of steps that would combine ‘existing’ emails and ‘new’ emails in a way that they can be accessed by the current computer app as well as from a browser. This would include all emails in folders, as well as anything in the InBox.

Work break down for next steps

Have all ‘new’ emails continue to be handled by Google Workspace during the migration.
Keep EIMS offline until ready for migration.
EIMS - remove unused domains. This will maintain the users and their emails.
EIMS - select a domain that is not being used by any of the current clients (theSalmonLodge.ca or gaspeSalmon.ca) as a temporary domain to connect to.
EasyDNS - setup URL for mail.gaspesalmon.ca which uses one of the reserved IPs. Should probably be an unused IP address to avoid confusion.
EIMS - Add the domain and IP to the server preferences.
Provide users instructions/assistance on how to change the POP and SMTP for existing mail.campbonaventure.com etc. over to mail.gaspesalmon.ca. This will allow access to anything still on the server, however since no emails are coming in to EIMS any longer, all new emails will be in Google Workspace. Assistance with this could come from Benoit locally. It will probably need local asssistance.
Once all clients have been changes, turn EIMS back on.
On each user, create a Google Workspace account.
Provide users instructions/assistance on how to move ‘existing’ emails over to Google. In the ‘new’ Google account, create folders that match what exists in the ‘existing’ client. Move all stored emails into the Google Workspace account. This will allow all emails and folders will not be accessible from the client app and the web browser. This is a time consuming and repetitive process that could benefit from local support.
Take the EIMS server off line when all files have been moved.
Archive for legal requirements.
Keep the server available for a period of time (to the end of the season?) in case emails need to be recovered and have been missed.

Power Outage May 21, 2022

User Saved eMails - How to handle?