Am I trapped with Go Daddy forever for my personal email?

Imapsync. Used by Linux engineers since forever to copy email accounts from one server to another

This isn't too bad. Get yourself a good imap client (I use Thunderbird, but many will do). Copy all email into local folders.

Migrate your hosting to a new provider. Then you can just as easily push your locally copied messages up.

There are also specific email backup / migration tools, but TBH, I've never really seen the need.

simple version:

1. save your existing mail locally

2. point the DNS record of your domain name at whatever new service you are buying (they should have instructions on that)

3. import some / all / none of the mail you saved locally to the new service as you see fit

now your email will come and go from your new mail service

Oh man I am sort of forever angry for GoDaddy...

I had GoDaddy as my DNS registrar for over a decade. When I first signed up, they offered free email. I didn't take up on this offer at first because it added complexity - it didn't seem to work as I wanted (my homeserver is my smtp server). I wanted it to be a backup server by perhaps running a catchall and queue mail to my home server in case it goes down -- seemed like something that could be done.

Fast forward to a few years ago. They decided to go with Microsoft as their mail server. No more catchall. No no no, this will not work. at all anymore. So I just gave it up. Sigh.

I ended up just not running an alternate MX as most servers will retry anyway, though I've been desubbed a few times with a few mail lists due to bouncing, alas my server has been fairly stable and the bouncing hasn't happened way too often.

Do you have a custom domain name? If so, that makes it a bit more complicated as you'll want to transfer DNS as well.

For DNS, I recommend looking at services like NameCheap that specialize in that. They'll have some documentation around how to transfer DNS registration. You should be able to find other options for DNS searching this subreddit as well.

The second thing will be email hosting. One of the more popular ones out there these days is Fastmail. They have some documentation about how to migrate your emails over which is basically just allowing for an IMAP connection. Other email providers can also be found by searching through this subreddit.

Lastly, I would do these things one at a time. Migrating emails might be easier to do first, then update all the DNS stuff to point to your new server, then change registration of DNS. Reaching out to the DNS and Email providers, their support crews should be able to help fill in specifics of how to do that.

Here is how i use email with my custom domain for free. Transfer your domain to cloudflare(affordable renewal prices than any other domain registration service). I use skiff mail with my domain to send and receive emails, skiff mail is a free service for custom domains.

You can easily archive your emails and add them back later….just move off go daddy!

You are in a situation, where you are imposing a limitation on yourself for no reason!

I'm not super knowledgeable about all this, but I have a solution I think would work.

First, start with whatever your new provider of choice is. Ensure that you've swapped over on every service you use and with all clients/individuals.

After you've stopped receiving emails at your current provider, look for a way to download an archive of all your important emails. Be sure you've cleaned it up, so that you aren't downloading things you don't need.

From there, create several backups, ideally incorporating at least two types of solutions. You likely won't be able to use an app, but you'd still have access if you need it. Though there may be a way for outlook to read the archive for you, I'm just not familiar enough to know for sure.

You can migrate emails to a new provider , I have done it for companies before , find yourself someone you trust to do the work for you,

Simplest option: Switch to Gmail and add your domain as an alias.

Not so simple, but not by a great deal: Switch to Zoho.

Another option, depending on your device type, is to use a custom domain name alias provided by Apple’s iCloud services. If you pay for any type of iCloud plan, you can use custom domain names as an email alias. For your domain name, I would strongly suggest transferring it to Cloudflare. I moved all of my domains to Cloudflare and it was effortless. To use iCloud for your domain, you do have to edit your DNS records, but Apple provides guides on how to do so.

To give you some context, GoDaddy email is actually Outlook 365 (now Microsoft 365), which is normally $99/year but GoDaddy slap a higher price on it.

If you were knowledgeable about Outlook admin/Azure you could simply disconnect your Microsoft Outlook tenant from GoDaddy and stop your subscription.

Since you're not, you can use BitTitan.com to help you migrate, it's $12/user and you can ask their sales support to help with all the gory details. Basically you make a new account on whatever service you want and they get all your mail over. Make sure that the new service you get can hold all your mail (has enough space) and also has 4 mailboxes – BitTitan moves your email but getting the right service is on you.

If you're ok using Outlook and Exchange you can ask BitTitan to move you to another Microsoft 365 account, which as I said is $99/year for a family account of up to 6 users.

If you want you can also shop around for regular IMAP (non-Exchange) providers, which will let you use a wider range of mail apps, and ask BitTitan to move you to one of them. But keep in mind that most providers charge $3-5/user/month, which for 4 users adds up to something similar to what you're paying now, or more. One notable alternative is Migadu.com's Mini plan, $90/year with no user limits, but you all have to share 30 GB of storage space. MXroute.com is another option, they offer more space for cheaper, same deal (no user limits, y'all share the same storage space). Personally I prefer Migadu for my family because their control panel has more features, they're hosted in the EU which for me makes more sense, and they're a company rather than a one guy operation; but if you need more space MXroute is perfectly fine too.

The email export and migration is the hardest part. There may be some paid tools that could help facilities it into a major email provider.

If the accounts are now via office365 then you can use the outlook desktop client and export your mailbox to pst. Your account may also allow connecting by powershell and exporting to pst.

Thunderbird may be able to cache it all as well if somehow imap may still be allowed.

Once you know your exports are good then you can proceed with the below.

Switch dns to cloudflare free.

Pay for new email provider. Setup your accounts. Import the pst data.

Set your mx (mail records) to new email provider.

Do a updated export/sync of your godaddy mailbox after 72 hours and import the delta into your new email provider.

If you're non-technical and don't know any of the above then ask a friend or pay for some help.

If you have an iCloud account you can get custom domain emails for $2 a month. Might be a cheep option

I recently moved my custom domain email from Microsoft 365 (with GoDaddy registrar and DNS) to iCloud+ (using CloudFlare as registrar and DNS). I was looking to transfer since Microsoft is going to stop officially supporting custom domain email hosting.

I simply used an email client that supports IMAP to transfer everything. Logged into the Microsoft 365 instance of the email account and had the client download ALL of the email messages. Then transferred my DNS and domain from GoDaddy to CloudFlare. Set up the custom domain email through iCloud+, set up iCloud email via IMAP in the email client, then within the email client I dragged and dropped the emails to the new account. It took over a day to transfer around 100k emails.

I use fastmail.com not free. But they are great and work on everything.

https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/1500000278042-Adding-Fastmail-nameservers-to-GoDaddy

You really have two problems

The first problem is archival and storage of your existing messages. For this you are dependent on whatever tools GoDaddy gives you, if GoDaddy is your current email provider and client. There's probably a way to use an email client to connect with the IMAP server and download them, but the place to start is with the GoDaddy documentation.

The second problem is how to move your domain name registration to a new registrar. The good news is that this is always possible, annoying but not difficult, and allows you to completely retain control over the domains. Here again you need godaddy's documentation regarding how to transfer the domain name to another registrar. Cloudflare is one option that allows email forwarding and has excellent documentation, but there are lots of alternatives. It should cost you about $12 a year for your domain, and email forwarding from there should be free. The easiest system is just to have a Gmail address that all of your custom addresses forward to, but it's up to you.

Thank you everybody! I am overwhelmed with appreciation for your collective responses. It seems like I am far from trapped. Thank you very very very much.

I’d recommend switching to Office 365 and you can keep the domain with godaddy but cancel their email hosting so it should be around $20 a year for that and then the cheapest plan for Office 365 is $10 per user. Since godaddy also uses outlook, it should be relatively easy to move the data over.