What's Nethserver?

A lot of small businesses run a customized Linux distribution specialized to small offices and medium enterprises. Nethserver is such a Linux distro based on the popular Centos 7. Nethserver is an operating system for Linux enthusiasts, designed for SMB companies. It features a nice web based administration interface, and offers various applications, eg. groupware, file server, mail server, vpn, private cloud, team chat, and many more.

Email archiving is a hot topic for even SMB companies. Fortunately, Nethserver 7 offers you email archiving capabilities featuring piler. Together with the Nethserver team we’ve managed to deploy and run the open source version of piler in a dockerized environment.

 

Docker makes it as simple as 1-2-3

Usually you need to install quite a few prerequisites to make piler work. However, to allow you deploy piler both the quickest and the easiest way possible, we have decided to take the containerization approach using Docker. Just follow the documentation at https://wiki.nethserver.org/doku.php?id=module:piler to bootstrap the archive.

After the installation you’ll have the default admin and auditor accounts, as well support for all users to authenticate against IMAP, and probably LDAP in future releases. It also features a wrapper script to import emails from all or selected accounts to the archive.

The web based GUI of the archive is available at https://piler.yourdomain.com by default, but you may customize the URL.

It's really flexible

You may install piler on the same Nethserver host where other services are running, eg. web server, file server, mail server, etc. It gives you the simplicity to manage a single instance of Nethserver.

However, you are free to deploy another Nethserver instance dedicated to the email archive. Such setup gives you greater performance and isolation from the mail server. Either way, Nethserver is a great choice to run your email archive featuring piler.

Credits

Special thanks to Stephane de Labrusse for adding piler support to Nethserver.