Leaving Rackspace: the step-by-step move

In January 2026 Rackspace told customers that Email hosting would go from roughly $2.99 to $10 per mailbox per month. Resellers reported increases of 400% to 706%, with about a month and a half of notice. Nothing about the service changed: the same 25 GB mailboxes, the same interface.

If you are here you have probably done the arithmetic. This guide is the part after the arithmetic: what the alternatives cost at your size, and how to move without a gap in your mail.

What eleven mailboxes cost, host by host

List prices, per month, at the mailbox counts a small company actually has. Hosts that bill per user are multiplied out; hosts that bill per account are flat.

Two honest notes. Migadu is cheaper than us for plain hosting, and if all you want is mailboxes with IMAP it is an excellent choice; its Mini plan caps at 100 outbound messages a day and 1,000 inbound. Workspace and Fastmail include things we do not: documents, shared calendars, contacts sync. If your team lives in Google Docs, keep one Workspace seat for the founder and move the shared addresses, which is the pattern that costs least.

What FounderMail adds is the dashboard: every message from one person, across every mailbox in the account, in one thread list, with your own customer record beside it. If your problem is "the same customer wrote to billing@ and support@ and nobody noticed", that is what the extra $3 a month over Migadu is for. And if you are small enough, the Free plan is not on the table above because it costs nothing: 500 received messages a month, IMAP and SMTP included.

Before you start

• An inventory. Every address at Rackspace, who uses it, and whether it is a real mailbox or an alias. An alias stays an alias here on every plan, Free included (receive-only, delivering into one of your mailboxes), and a mailbox costs nothing either, since there is no per-mailbox charge.
• Access to your DNS. The registrar or DNS host for the domain, not Rackspace's control panel. You will add a TXT record, change the MX record and add a few more.
• Each mailbox's Rackspace password, for the IMAP copy in step 4.
• A quiet day. The whole move is an afternoon for a small team. The fiddly part is reconfiguring phones and laptops, not anything on the server side.

The cutover, in order

The order is what stops you losing a day of mail. Do not skip ahead to the MX record.

1. Create your FounderMail account and add the domain. The domain page gives you a TXT record that proves you own the domain. Publish it now; it changes nothing at Rackspace. Once it is found, the domain is yours. How domains work.
2. Create the mailboxes, with the same local parts as at Rackspace: hello@, billing@, everyone's personal address. Each gets its own password for IMAP and SMTP. Keep the list; you will need it twice.
3. Enable sending on the domain and publish its records. The domain page issues three DKIM CNAME records and a bounce subdomain. Add them now, and add include:foundermail.mx to your existing SPF record without removing Rackspace's include yet, so both hosts can send during the overlap.
4. Import the archive. On each mailbox's page choose Import mail from another provider, pick Another IMAP server, enter secure.emailsrvr.com and the Rackspace address and password. The importer copies your folders in the background, with dates and read state; nothing is deleted at Rackspace. Details are in Moving in from another host.
5. Change the MX record. Replace Rackspace's MX records (mx1.emailsrvr.com and mx2.emailsrvr.com) with one record: 10 smtp.foundermail.mx. Nothing already delivered to Rackspace moves, which is why the copy came first. The domain page checks every ten seconds and turns green when the change has propagated; nobody has to watch it.
6. Point every client at the new server. IMAP imap.foundermail.mx port 993 (SSL/TLS), SMTP smtp.foundermail.mx port 587 (STARTTLS), username the full address, password from the mailbox page. The dashboard works in the meantime without any of this.
7. Run the import once more, a day later. It picks up whatever landed at Rackspace during propagation. This is the step people skip and then miss an afternoon of mail.
8. Request outbound access if you write first. A new domain can reply to anyone who has written to it. Sending to people who have not, such as invoices to new customers, needs outbound access, requested from the domain page and reviewed within a day. Ask during the migration rather than on the first working day.
9. Cancel Rackspace after a week of mail arriving normally, and only then remove its SPF include.

What to check before committing

• Calendars. If your team relies on Rackspace's shared calendars, we do not replace them: we host mail, not a groupware suite. Fastmail and Workspace do.
• Volume. Pro includes 15,000 received and 40,000 sent messages a month across the whole account. Eleven busy mailboxes fit comfortably; a mailing list does not, and is not what this is for.
• Retention. Pro keeps everything. The Free plan includes twelve months of mail, which matters if you are moving a decade of archive onto it.

Start free, publish the ownership record, and copy one mailbox before you touch the MX. If it is not better than what you have, the record takes two minutes to remove.

Sources

• The Register, 20 January 2026: Rackspace's email price rise
• Google Workspace, Fastmail and Migadu prices read from their pricing pages on 5 September 2026: workspace.google.com/pricing, fastmail.com/pricing, migadu.com/pricing. Workspace is the monthly list price; the annual commitment is about 16% less. Check them before deciding.