The Day Our Mail Server Failed

Our entire IT department would never wish a Monday start as the day we started with an email server failure. Everything began as a usual Monday morning with a cup of coffee in hand. Our entire team had barely settled down when one of my colleagues’ mobile phones rang.

Are emails down today?

Before we could respond to the first message, we got another notification on the mobile phone:

‘My server says, Mail Server Failed.’

Additionally, I received a similar message within a short while. Hence, within almost five minutes, the IT support desk was filled with such messages from several employees. This indicated that it was not an individual scenario but rather a company-wide occurrence. Everyone’s emails were down.

It was at this point that we realized it would not be a typical day for us. Our company mail server bore the responsibility of the majority of the firm’s communication needs. As a result, the entire business came to a standstill once the system went down.

Logging into the system revealed that something was going wrong. The services were suspended, the mailbox storage hit its capacity, and the event logs kept filling up faster than we could react and read them.

The first idea that came to mind was to restart the mail services. However, that did not resolve the situation.

For like two hours, our entire team worked continuously to fix the problem. Each step taken led us back to the drawing board.

At around noon, our operations manager arrived at the server room. The atmosphere was tense as he inquired, “Can you give me an estimate?” Unfortunately, we had no solution at that time; hence, we decided to keep working on it while responding to his inquiries.

After going through the logs for the second time, we suspected that things were too far gone. At that point, it would not make sense to attempt to restart the server because, even if it worked, it would fail again later that day.

It was at this point that we decided to change strategies and focus on resolving the issue. Our entire IT team came to the agreement that it would be a good idea to transition everyone’s mailboxes to Microsoft 365 instead of stressing about the same problem occurring again.

As a result, we got all of our colleagues’ mailbox information, checked permission rights, and migrated them to the cloud-based email platform. Kernel Email Migrator was the tool we used to do the migration. We preferred this email migration tool because it allowed us to migrate multiple mailboxes at the same time without making the already-bad day any worse.

As well as, they have multiple advanced feature for this growing technology. Apart from the email migration for different email clients, we easily migrated Zoho Mail to Gmail Account.

The first indicator that our efforts had paid off was the sight of the percentage advancing on the dashboard. Anxiety was still on its peak as several large mailboxes took longer than expected to finish transferring. Every second that passed seemed like it was taking forever. But instead of stressing out, we took it step by step.

It was late in the evening when the office was almost empty. Most of our colleagues had already left, but the IT team was still grinding to get this failed server fixed as quickly as possible. We ordered some pizza, exchanged updates on the migration, and worked tirelessly to ensure the last percent completed. We kept on working until the last mailbox was finished.

The following day, we arrived at the office early. For a few minutes, everyone was silent as they stared at the monitor. Then, one by one, they clicked the login button and began sending and receiving emails. The hushed murmurs of emails being sent and received quickly filled the room.

Business was back to normal as people clicked around Outlook. It was only then that we realized how much this day had taught us. It showed to us all that not only does technology have a mind of its own, but it also has the capacity to make everyone’s life miserable without warning.

This is the story that how our Email Migration Turned Out Easier Than Expected