Choosing between CloudFiler and Ideagen Mail Manager when long projects outlast the team

A feature list rarely captures the thing that actually matters when a dispute lands six years later.

The short answer: Ideagen Mail Manager and CloudFiler overlap on the basics, including New Outlook, mobile and filing to SharePoint, ProjectWise and network drives, so the decision comes down to track record and what happens to your email when people leave. Mail Manager has run since 2003 and files email to the project, not the person, directly into your own infrastructure. For long-running projects and disputes, that history is the deciding factor.

What should actually drive an email filing decision?

A project finished six years ago. A client now says a design change was never approved. The engineer who handled it left in 2023, and the correspondence that would settle it lived in a personal inbox that closed when they walked out the door. This is the moment an email filing tool exists for, and it is the one a price comparison never shows.

When firms weigh Mail Manager against a newer, lower-cost option like CloudFiler, the temptation is to line up features and choose on the smallest Year 1 number. That reasoning skips the reason the category exists.

What does email filing actually protect you from?

Two things. The first is a dispute you have to defend, where you need to produce email evidence quickly and completely, and it has to stand up. Without a filing system, that search takes days of IT time with no guarantee everything surfaces. At Nitsch Engineering, e-discovery went from weeks to minutes once project email was filed centrally.

The second is quieter and more common. Project teams disband, people leave, and years of client correspondence, agreements and approvals leave with them.

Mail Manager files email to the project, not the person. When someone leaves, the record stays, and it stays findable. At Formation Architects, finding a specific email went from up to a week to seconds. That is the outcome to buy for, not the filing itself.

Where do Mail Manager and CloudFiler genuinely differ?

Both tools file email from Outlook, including New Outlook and mobile, and both file to SharePoint, ProjectWise and network drives. CloudFiler adds Egnyte and Box filing, Mac support, OCR and color-coded search results. If your team needs those specifically, that is a point in its favor. Mail Manager files to Procore, Viewpoint, Teams and on-premises SharePoint, and adds rules-based auto-filing, duplicate detection and offline search.

The table below sets out where each product leads, based on published product information as of October 2026.

What you need	Why it matters	Idegaen Mail Manager	CloudFiler
Find the email that settles a dispute
Boolean and fuzzy search	Pull the one email that matters, even with a misspelled name or half-remembered subject	✓	✗
Social mapping	See who emailed whom on a project in one view, so "I never received it" can be checked in seconds	✓	✗
Filing audit trail	Show when and how correspondence was filed if the record is challenged	✓	✗
Offline search	Search the full project record on site or in a meeting with no connection	✓ (Classic Outlook)	✗
Keep the record when people leave
Rules-based auto-filing	Email gets filed even when someone forgets or leaves mid-project	✓	✗
File on send	Outgoing advice and approvals are captured the moment they are sent	✓	Partial
Duplicate detection	One clean record per project, not the same thread from five inboxes	✓	✗
File where your projects already live
SharePoint Online, ProjectWise and network drives	Use the destinations most project firms already run on	✓	✓
Procore and Viewpoint	Correspondence sits beside the construction record it relates to	✓	✗
Microsoft Teams and on-premises SharePoint	Cover firms that keep projects in Teams or on their own servers	✓	✗
Egnyte and Box	Cover firms standardized on those platforms	✗	✓
Fit how your team works
New Outlook	Keep filing as Microsoft moves users to the new client	Partial (alongside Classic Outlook)	✓
Outlook for Mac	Support teams that work on Mac	✗ (available in Mail Manager Enterprise)	✓
Outlook mobile	File and find project email away from the desk	✓	✓
Central admin deployment	Roll out to every user from one place, without desk-by-desk installs	✓	✗

✓ = full support. Partial = limited or conditional support. ✗ = not supported. Mail Manager supports New Outlook through the Mail Manager Desktop NOW Bridge in v15.1+, running alongside Classic Outlook with the same filing engine.

The other difference is where your email lives. CloudFiler runs a cloud index that connects to Exchange Online, outside your own infrastructure. Mail Manager files directly into the destinations you already control, including on-premises servers, and has been refined since 2003 across 48,000+ users at 2,600+ AEC firms. For firms that need the record to sit entirely on their own systems, that difference matters.

What does a price comparison miss?

Which tool do you trust to surface a ten-year-old email in a live dispute? Mail Manager has run continuously since 2003, long enough to be tested across full project liability periods. Customers have stayed since 2004, which is evidence it works rather than loyalty to something old. One prevented dispute tends to outweigh years of any license difference.

None of this means the cheaper tool is wrong for every firm. For a small team buying on Year 1 cost, or a team that works on Mac, it may fit. For a firm carrying real exposure across long projects, the calculation is different.

Frequently asked questions

Is a cheaper email filing tool a false economy?

Not always. For a small team buying on Year 1 cost, a lower-cost tool can fit. The risk shows on long projects, where one email you cannot produce in a dispute can cost far more than years of any license difference.

What happens to filed email when an employee leaves?

With Mail Manager, the record stays, because email files to the project rather than the person. When someone leaves, their client correspondence remains centrally accessible and searchable.

Does Mail Manager support New Outlook?

Yes. Mail Manager supports New Outlook through the Mail Manager Desktop NOW Bridge in v15.1+, running alongside Classic Outlook with the same filing engine, so filing and search behave the same in both.

How long has Mail Manager been in use?

Since 2003. It was built at Arup to solve Arup's own email problem, is still used by Arup today and is trusted by 48,000+ users across 2,600+ AEC firms. Customers have stayed since 2004.