How organizations replace Barracuda, Mimecast, Proofpoint, and other legacy email security gateways — without downtime or lost quarantine.
This is the operator’s version of a migration page. No marketing fluff. Just the timeline, the decisions you’ll face, what we handle, and how we roll back if anything goes sideways.
TYPICAL PROJECT
Five stages. Most organizations complete the whole sequence in two to three weeks. You decide the pace.
A short call covering your current vendor, policy complexity, user count, compliance posture, and any archiving obligations. We’ll tell you what we’ll port cleanly and what we’ll need to rebuild.
Deliverable: migration scope document, proposed rule mapping, trial tenant provisioned.
OpenEFA runs alongside your existing filter in “shadow” mode. Your current filter still makes the delivery decisions. OpenEFA scores every message independently so you can compare verdicts before anything reaches production.
What you get: a side-by-side verdict report — messages both filters agreed on, messages only OpenEFA flagged, messages only your legacy filter flagged — with full reasoning on each.
We export from your current vendor and import into OpenEFA: sender whitelists and blocklists, domain-level policies, custom rules, attachment and URL allow-lists. Where rules don’t have a one-to-one equivalent, we translate them into OpenEFA’s model.
Not automatic: per-user mailbox preferences (we rebuild these from your directory). Not needed: reputation training data — OpenEFA builds its own baselines during the parallel run.
You change MX records to mx1.openefa.com. DNS propagation completes within minutes to a few hours depending on your TTL. OpenEFA is now making delivery decisions; your old filter continues to receive stragglers until DNS fully rolls over.
Recommended: lower MX TTL to 300 seconds 24 hours before cutover to shorten the window.
Leave the old filter in place through the end of its current billing term — it’s your safety net. When you’re confident, submit non-renewal and let the contract lapse. No sudden cancellation penalties.
If you decide to roll back: flip MX back. OpenEFA won’t fight it. See the rollback section below.
Migrations from different legacy platforms have different gotchas. Here’s what we see most often.
FROM
Email Security Gateway, Email Protection, Impersonation Protection, and legacy Spam Firewall appliances.
What ports cleanly
What we rebuild
Timing
Barracuda contracts are usually 1–3 year terms with auto-renewal. Check your renewal date before cutover and set a calendar reminder to submit non-renewal.
FROM
Mimecast Email Security, Targeted Threat Protection (URL/Attachment/Impersonation), and Cloud Archive.
What ports cleanly
What we rebuild
Archiving
If you’re on Mimecast Cloud Archive, OpenEFA Comply ($8/user) or Vault ($10/user) provides equivalent retention. We coordinate an archive export with Mimecast before decommission.
FROM
Proofpoint Essentials, Enterprise Email Protection, Targeted Attack Protection (TAP), and Threat Response Auto-Pull (TRAP).
What ports cleanly
What we rebuild
Timing
Proofpoint Essentials is typically month-to-month; Enterprise contracts are annual. Most migrations time cutover to the month before renewal.
Other vendors (Avanan, Abnormal, INKY, etc.)? Contact us — we’ve done it.
Compared against the general class of legacy cloud gateways, not any single vendor. Individual product capabilities vary.
| Legacy gateways | OpenEFA | |
|---|---|---|
| Deployment | Multi-step onboarding; professional services often required | MX change in minutes. No hardware, no agents. |
| Pricing model | Mailbox + per-feature add-ons (TAP, archive, encryption, etc.) | Flat per-user tiers from $5–$10. Archiving built in from the $6 tier. |
| Contract length | Typically 1–3 year terms with auto-renewal | No long-term contract. Cancel anytime. |
| Verdict explainability | Opaque risk score; limited breakdown in admin console | Full per-signal breakdown. Every weight visible. Tune inline. |
| BEC / intent detection | Rule-per-signal; bolt-on modules for impersonation | Dedicated intent layer: NLP classifier + behavioral relationship graph. |
| First-contact senders | Scored by reputation; unknown = no signal | Explicitly flagged; baseline threshold adjusted per-domain. |
| URL handling | URL rewriting with click-time lookup (breaks outbound, adds latency) | Inline URL risk scoring. No rewriting. Original links preserved. |
| Data residency | Cloud-only for most tiers; on-prem appliances require separate product lines | Cloud, managed on-prem appliance, private cloud, or air-gapped — same platform. |
| Privacy posture | Many vendors send message content to third-party cloud AI for analysis | Proprietary ML runs entirely in OpenEFA infrastructure. No third-party AI training. |
| Support | Tiered support; premium tiers required for direct engineer access | 18/7 live support + 24/7 emergency included on every plan. |
Comparisons reflect OpenEFA’s understanding of typical legacy gateway deployments as of 2026. Vendor capabilities change — verify current features against your vendor’s documentation.
We don’t pretend migrations always go perfectly. Here’s how we plan for the case where they don’t.
We drop your MX TTL to 300 seconds at least 24 hours ahead. That means rollback DNS changes propagate in minutes, not hours.
Your existing filter remains active through its current billing term. It’s your safety net. Rollback is a DNS flip away, not a rebuy.
Every message OpenEFA has ever scored stays in your quarantine with full verdict history. If a rollback is needed, nothing is lost.
OpenEFA is month-to-month. If the migration doesn’t work for you, you don’t owe us for unused time. Cancel and walk.
In practice: rollbacks are rare. In the past year our own metric is that fewer than 2% of migrations require more than one MX adjustment post-cutover. But the plan exists because that’s how real operations work.
30 minutes. No slide deck. We’ll tell you what a migration from your current vendor actually looks like — including whether OpenEFA isn’t the right fit.