• PUID and PGID (please test it ;-)
• DONE, use the tar not the precompiled DEB, as the DEB is amd64 only.
• 70% DONE, hope i can add amd64, arm, arm64, ppc64le, s390x, as Supported Architectures
• 90% DONE, use ubuntu focal as docker base
• docker ENV for password setting
• generate secure random MYSQL passwords

Note that piler stores all emails and attachments as separate files. You may tweak inode ratio, if necessary. IMPORTANT! Make sure you never lose/overwrite the key otherwise you won't access your archive ever again. So whenever you upgrade be sure to keep your existing key file. Also NEVER change the iv parameter in piler.conf after installation. The piler mysql database contains essential information, including metadata, permissions, tags, etc. If you lost the piler database, your archive would stop working! So you must take a good care of the piler database.

Here are some example snippets to help you get started creating a container.

docker create \
  --name=piler \
  -e PUID=1000 `#optional` \
  -e PGID=1000 `#optional` \
  -e TZ=Europe/London `#optional` \
  -e PILER_HOST=archive.yourdomain.com \
  -p 443:443 `#optional` \
  -p 80:80 \
  -p 25:25 \
  -v </path/to/appdata/config>:/var/piler \
  --restart unless-stopped \
  woa7/piler:1.3.7

e.g.

PILER_VAR_DATA=/var/piler-data
docker create --name=piler -e PUID=1000 `#optional` -e PGID=1000 `#optional` -e PILER_HOST=archive.example.org -p 443:443 -p 25:25 -v ${PILER_VAR_DATA:-/default/path/to/appdata/config}:/var/piler --restart unless-stopped woa7/piler:1.3.7
docker start piler

or

  PILER_VAR_DATA=/var/piler-data
  docker run -d --name piler -p 25:25 -p 80:80 -p 443:443 -v ${PILER_VAR_DATA:-null}:/var/piler -e PILER_HOST=archive.example.org woa7/piler

• Shell access whilst the container is running: docker exec -it piler /bin/bash

PILER_VAR_DATA=/var/piler-data ; docker create --name=piler -e PUID=$(id -u) -e PGID=$(id -g) -e PILER_HOST=archive.example.org -p 25:25 -p 80:80 -p 443:443 -v ${PILER_VAR_DATA/config:-/dummy}:/config -v ${PILER_VAR_DATA/data:-/dummy}:/data woa7/piler:focal docker start piler ; docker logs -f piler

PILER_VAR_DATA=/var/piler-data ; docker run -d --name piler -e PUID=$(id -u) -e PGID=$(id -g) -e PILER_HOST=archive.example.org -p 25:25 -p 80:80 -p 443:443 -v ${PILER_VAR_DATA/config:-/dummy}:/config -v ${PILER_VAR_DATA/data:-/dummy}:/data woa7/piler:focal

When using volumes (-v flags) permissions issues can arise between the host OS and the container, we avoid this issue by allowing you to specify the user PUID and group PGID.

Ensure any volume directories on the host are owned by the same user you specify and any permissions issues will vanish like magic.

In this instance PUID=1000 and PGID=1000, to find yours use id user as below:

  on the host OS:
  $ id username
    uid=1000(dockeruser) gid=1000(dockergroup) groups=1000(dockergroup)

default logins:
admin account:	admin@local
admin password: pilerrocks
auditor account:	auditor@local
auditor password: auditor

How to build

check out git clone [email protected]:woa7/docker-piler.git && cd docker-piler

Pick the latest deb package from Bitbucket download page (https://bitbucket.org/jsuto/piler/downloads/) and use it as the PACKAGE build argument, eg.

docker build --build-arg PACKAGE=piler_1.3.7-bionic-94c54a0_amd64.deb --build-arg PACKAGE_DOWNLOAD_SHA256=025bf31155d31c4764c037df29703f85e2e56d66455616a25411928380f49d7c -t woa7/piler .

How to run the image

Set the PILER_HOST env variable to match your hostname, eg.

docker run -d --name piler1 -p 25:25 -p 80:80 -e PILER_HOST=archive.example.org woa7/piler

Our image support only amd64 at the time, as architectures. as the sphinx is only amd64.

http://www.mailpiler.org/wiki/current:index

Email archiving provides lots of benefits to your company. Piler is a feature rich open source email archiving solution, and a viable alternative to commercial email archiving products; check out the comparison with Mailarchiva.

Piler has a nice GUI written in PHP supporting several authentication methods (AD/LDAP, SSO, Google OAuth, 2 FA, IMAP, POP3). Be sure to try the online demo!

Piler supports

archiving and retention rules legal hold deduplication digital fingerprinting and verification full text search tagging emails view, export, restore emails bulk import/export messages audit logs Google Apps Office 365 and many more

The piler email archiver uses the following components:

mysql: piler stores crucial metadata of the messages sphinx: a search engine used by the gui to return the search results file system: this is where the encrypted and compressed messages, attachments are stored How do emails get to the archive? You configure your email server to pass a copy of emails to the piler daemon via smtp, since piler is an SMTP(-talking) daemon. Note that you don't need to create any system or virtual users or email addresses for the piler daemon to work, because it simply archives every email it receives.

When an email is received, then it's parsed, disassembled, compressed, encrypted, and finally stored in the file system: one file for every email and attachment. Also, the textual data is written to the sph_index table. The periodic indexer job reads the sph_index table, and updates the sphinx databases.

The GUI uses sphinx and mysql database to return the search results to the users.

Piler has a built-in access control to prevent a user to access other's messages. Auditors can see every archived email. Piler parses the header and extracts the From:, To: and Cc: addresses (in case of From: it only stores the first email address, since some spammers include tons of addresses in the From: field), and when a user searches for his emails then piler tries to match his email addresses against the email addresses in the messages. To sum it up, a regular user can see only the emails he sent or received.

This leads to a limitation: piler will hide an email from a user if he was (only) in the Bcc: field. This limitation has another side effect related to external mailing lists. You have to maintain which user belongs to which external mailing lists, otherwise users won't see these messages. Internal mailing lists are not a problem as long as piler can extract the membership information from openldap OR Active Directory.

Fortunately both Exchange and postfix (and probably some other MTAs, too) are able to put envelope recipients to the email, so the limitation mentioned above is solved.