Don’t migrate yourself into something you will later have to migrate away from.
Email management is what we do, so we spend a good deal of our time demonstrating it. To project managers, architects, engineers and document controllers. To quantity surveyors, contract administrators, accountants and solicitors. To IT managers, practice managers, compliance leads, and the partners and directors who end up signing for it.
Different sectors, different job titles, very different reasons for connecting, yet remarkably consistent feedback: practices like their data where it is. They have spent years building a filing structure that works, they know where things live, and they are wary of anything that wants to move it.
That instinct is right, and it is worth being clear about why, because the real cost isn’t the migration itself. It is what you are left with afterwards.
The split-record problem
If your email ends up in a vendor’s system while your drawings, contracts and models stay in SharePoint, Autodesk Docs or on your file server, you no longer have a project record. You have two of them. The gap between them is where the headaches live.
It starts small. Someone searches the project folder for a piece of correspondence and doesn’t find it, because correspondence doesn’t live there any more. A new starter joins the team and needs access, which is now two requests, in two systems, under two permission models that don’t quite agree with each other.
Then it starts to matter. A project completes and you owe the client a handover: files from one place, correspondence from another, and somebody has to reconcile the two. A dispute surfaces three years later and your solicitor wants everything relating to one variation: the drawing, the instruction, and the email thread that connected them. Two of those three are in one system and the third is somewhere else, possibly behind a subscription you have since stopped paying.
None of this is exotic. It is the ordinary friction of keeping one project’s information in two places, and it compounds quietly for as long as the practice exists.
Leaving your data where it is
eFiler365 takes the other route. It files the email straight into the folder the project already lives in: SharePoint, OneDrive, Autodesk Docs, Google Drive, Egnyte, or the network drive you have been using for fifteen years. It arrives as a standard .eml file, normally inside an emails folder alongside other project folders and inheriting the same folder permissions as everything else in there.
Because nothing moves, there is nothing to migrate: no import project, no bulk upload, no consulting days billed by the terabyte, no weekend where nobody can file anything. And because we never hold your email, we never charge you to hold it. There is no set-up fee, and no storage line that climbs as your archive does. We have written about that side of it in more detail here.
For this argument the point is simpler. The reason there is no migration is the same reason there is no second record to keep in step: your project folder was always the destination.
Flexibility, in practice
Real practices are untidy. The design team lives in Autodesk Docs, finance is on SharePoint, one team never left the file server, and a joint venture partner insists on Google Drive. eFiler365 files to all of them, so you don’t have to tidy up your estate before you can tidy up your email.
It runs as a web add-in, so the same thing works in Outlook Classic, New Outlook, Outlook on the web and on a phone, Mac included. That matters more with every passing month. As New Outlook shifts from the thing you opt into to the thing you are given by default, a web add-in simply carries across: nothing to reinstall, no separate product for the people who have already moved, and no scramble when Microsoft changes the date again. Its sync service runs on Windows or Linux, on your own server, which means the search index over your correspondence stays in your estate too.
What this means depending on where you sit
If you run projects: correspondence sits in the project folder with everything else, so there is one place to look, one handover, and one set of information to produce when something goes wrong.
If you run IT: no new data estate to secure. Filed emails inherit the permissions of wherever they land, and your existing backup, retention, DLP and eDiscovery tooling keeps working unchanged, because the files never left.
If you run the practice: no set-up fee, no migration project, no storage meter, and no exit problem. Stop paying us tomorrow and every filed email is still sitting in your storage, readable by any email client.
The alternatives, briefly
Most email management tools divide neatly on a single question: whose system does the email end up in?
Credit where it is due: Ideagen Mail Manager takes the same fundamental position, stating plainly that emails are saved to your own infrastructure. The difference is reach: their own prerequisites confirm a Windows-only client with no support for Outlook on Mac, and their destination list doesn’t extend to Autodesk Docs, Google Drive or Egnyte. Colligo and harmon.ie are capable tools but file only to SharePoint, Teams and OneDrive, which is fine until part of your estate isn’t Microsoft.
CloudFiler is the clearest example of the split-record model. Their documentation states that “CloudFiler maintains copies of your messages on secure servers on Amazon’s AWS service”, and their engineering blog explains that indexing runs “in the cloud too, removing the need to have local indexers”, so the search index over your correspondence sits with them as well. Syncing a copy back to your own storage is available further up the tiers; their Enterprise listing describes the ability to nominate an Amazon datacentre for a second copy. That wording is worth pausing on. Even at the top tier, what you are choosing is where the duplicate goes. The original stays with them.
Newforma Konekt is a cloud-native project platform where correspondence lives in Newforma’s system by design. A legitimate model, and a real decision to move your data rather than leave it alone.
The test worth running
Ask every vendor on your shortlist three questions. Where does a filed email physically get written? What format is it in? And if we leave, what exactly do we have to do to get it all back?
eFiler365’s answers are: into your project folder, as a standard email file, and nothing at all.
But if you take one thing from this, take the simplest version of it:
Don’t migrate yourself into something you will later have to migrate away from.
Statements about other products are drawn from those vendors’ own published documentation as at August 2026 and linked below, so you can check them yourself.
Sources: eFiler365, eFiler 365 technical documentation, Ideagen Mail Manager FAQ, Mail Manager prerequisites, Colligo Email Manager, CloudFiler: where is the data held, CloudFiler: the technology behind CloudFiler, CloudFiler: Enterprise, Newforma Konekt