Hosting firm Rackspace has introduced tools designed to make it easier for customers to migrate from an existing email system to its hosted email without losing any information or suffering any interruption to service.

Available immediately, the Rackspace Migration App has been added to the Control Panel in each customer's self-service console, and enables them to migrate email and email folders for their entire organisation from an old email system to Rackspace.

"When people move from internal email, you need to have some help available for them. We have our own tools, but many customers want the capability to do it themselves, so we've made it as drop-dead simple as possible to move from virtually any email server in the world," said Kirk Averett, director of products for Rackspace's email division.

Averett said that migration could take as little as an hour for a small business, but that large companies with hundreds of gigabytes of email information will probably run multiple passes to transfer everything.

Users can continue to access their email while the migration process takes place, according to Rackspace.

Migrations can also be scheduled for a specific date and time, and data transfer is automatic once the process starts.

Averett said that customers are switching to Rackspace hosted email because the firm can offer greater reliability for such a mission-critical service.

"People come to us because email is a challenge. We have the competence and the resource to keep applications available, we can provide far more reliability than an in-house server, and we want them to switch over," he said.