Reasons for a migration

Why would you migrate from your current archiving product in the first place? There may be several reasons justifying the change:

  • the currently used product may reached end of life (EOL), end of support (EOS) stage
  • it lacks crucial features
  • performance issues
  • you have acquired a company and want to ingest their archived emails as well, and keep one archive at the end of the day
  • whatever other reason

You may have read several articles how to migrate from to the given vendor’s product. Those vendors provide detailed guides, and support how to migrate from their competitors to their own products. It makes sense, it’s their best interest. It’s even my best interest.

The easy good-bye

However, I think it’s your best interest to ask your vendor before you purchase, how easy it is to migrate from the vendor’s product to something else. Would it release your archived data easily making the transition as smooth as possible, or would it take it as a hostage? Can you export all of your data at will, or would it require the reluctant support of your current vendor? (And a hefty bill, perhaps).

How to migrate from piler enterprise

Let me describe how you can get rid of piler enterprise. Piler uses open standards and open format. It stores the archived emails exactly in the same format as they are stored on your mail server, namely EML (RFC-2822 format). No proprietary format. No vendor lock in.

You simply execute “pilerexport -A” command, and it starts dumping lots of eml files, each representing a single email. That’s it. Optionally you may want to add them to a zip file, and digitally sign it. No worries, pilerexport can do it for you automatically.

Before you go

Now ask your vendor how simple is it to get rid of them if you want to? Is their procedure shorter than the above paragraph? Ask them, before you purchase.