BitTitan MigrationWiz Date Issue: How to Fix It

7 min

What Is BitTitan MigrationWiz?

BitTitan MigrationWiz is one of the most widely used commercial email migration platforms in the world. MSPs, IT consultants, and enterprise IT teams rely on MigrationWiz to move mailboxes between platforms, from on-premises Exchange to Microsoft 365, from Google Workspace to Exchange Online, or between any combination of IMAP-compatible systems. Millions of mailbox migrations have gone through MigrationWiz, and it's known for reliability and ease of use.

But there's one persistent issue that hits nearly every MigrationWiz migration: email dates.

After the migration completes, users open their mailbox in Outlook or another email client and find that every single email shows the migration date instead of the original received date. A mailbox spanning years of correspondence suddenly appears as though every message arrived on the same day. Five years of history, gone flat. It's disorienting, and for users who rely on date-based search and sorting, it's a serious productivity hit.

How MigrationWiz Causes the Date Problem

The mx.migrationwiz.com "Received" Header

During migration, MigrationWiz processes each email from the source server and uploads it to the destination. As part of this process, a new "Received" header is added to each message containing a reference to "mx.migrationwiz.com" and a timestamp matching the date and time the migration processed that specific email.

A typical MigrationWiz "Received" header looks something like this:

Received: from mx.migrationwiz.com by destination-server;
  Thu, 11 Apr 2019 14:22:33 +0000

This header gets inserted at the top of the email's header chain, making it the most recent "Received" header in the message.

Why Email Clients Display the Wrong Date

Email clients like Microsoft Outlook determine the "Received" date by reading the topmost "Received" header. Under normal circumstances, this header reflects the actual delivery time. After a MigrationWiz migration, the topmost header reflects the migration time instead. Every email in the mailbox shows the migration date as its received date. The original "Date" header (which records when the email was originally sent) is still present inside the message, but most email clients prioritize the "Received" header for display.

For a deeper explanation of why this happens across all migration tools, see why emails show wrong dates after IMAP migration.

How to Identify the MigrationWiz Header

Viewing Headers in Outlook

To confirm the date issue is caused by MigrationWiz, open any affected email in Outlook Desktop, click "File," then "Properties." Scroll down to the "Internet headers" box. Look for a "Received" header containing "migrationwiz" or "mx.migrationwiz.com." If this header exists and its timestamp matches the migration date, the diagnosis is confirmed.

Viewing Headers in Gmail

In the Gmail web interface, open the affected email, click the three dots menu in the upper right, and select "Show original." This displays the raw email headers. Search for "migrationwiz" in the header text. The MigrationWiz "Received" header will appear near the top of the header chain.

Viewing Headers in OWA (Outlook Web App)

In Outlook on the web, open the email, click the three dots, select "View," then "View message details." The raw headers appear in a popup. Search for "migrationwiz" to locate the migration header.

The Scale of the Problem

MigrationWiz migrations typically process entire mailboxes at once. Every email in every folder is affected: inbox, sent items, drafts, archives, custom folders. For a user with 10,000 emails spanning five years, all 10,000 messages show the same migration date. Date-based sorting becomes useless. Search results return misleading timestamps. Compliance tools that rely on received dates produce incorrect reports.

And for organizations with hundreds of users? The problem multiplies fast. Help desk tickets flood in. IT administrators face pressure to fix the issue but find no solution in MigrationWiz itself or in BitTitan's support documentation. Why doesn't BitTitan address this in their tooling? Because it's not technically a bug in their software, it's a consequence of how IMAP works.

Approaches to Fixing the MigrationWiz Date Issue

You might think writing a quick script to strip the offending header would do the trick. It won't. Or rather, it might work on simple plain-text emails, but the moment you encounter S/MIME signed messages, PGP-encrypted content, multipart MIME structures with nested boundaries, or emails with non-ASCII encoded headers (RFC 2047), a naive script will corrupt data. And the worst part is you might not notice the corruption until months later when someone tries to open an important attachment and finds it's been silently destroyed.

This is not a simple header edit. Properly handling the full spectrum of email formats, from legacy encodings to modern multipart structures with inline images and Content-Transfer-Encoding variations, requires deep knowledge of RFC 2822 and MIME standards. A single misplaced byte in a MIME boundary can render an entire email unreadable (not the kind of thing you want to discover on a Monday morning). For multiple mailboxes, the manual approach simply isn't feasible.

Re-migration (Expensive, Same Result)

Some administrators consider re-running the migration with different MigrationWiz settings. Unfortunately, re-migration doesn't solve the date issue. MigrationWiz adds the "Received" header during every migration. A second migration adds yet another "Received" header, further complicating the header chain without fixing the date. Re-migration also costs additional licensing fees and requires significant downtime. For a comparison of all fix approaches and their costs, see can email dates be fixed after migration.

Automated Fix with Redate.io

Redate.io is purpose-built to fix email dates after migration, with specific support for MigrationWiz headers. Redate.io's proprietary correction engine analyzes the complete header chain of each message, applies pattern matching against hundreds of known migration tool signatures (including MigrationWiz-specific patterns), and runs every email through a multi-stage analysis pipeline that handles encoding edge cases, multipart message structures, and digital signatures. The result: correct dates restored across every email, with integrity verification confirming each fix before it's finalized.

Fixing MigrationWiz Dates with Redate.io

Connect the Mailbox

Log in to Redate.io and connect the affected mailbox. For Google Workspace, this uses domain-wide delegation via a Service Account. For Microsoft 365, it uses Azure AD app registration. For other IMAP servers, standard credentials are used. Admin-level access allows fixing multiple mailboxes from a single connection.

Run the Free Scan

Redate.io scans the mailbox and identifies every email with a MigrationWiz "Received" header. The scan is completely free and shows a detailed report: total emails scanned, number of emails affected, and the migration date detected. No payment is required to see the scan results.

Review and Fix

After reviewing the scan results, select a plan based on the number of affected emails and start the fix. Original messages are moved to a visible "Redate.io - Originals" folder (not deleted) and kept for 30 days. Every correction goes through integrity verification, comparing the corrected message against the original to ensure zero data loss.

Verify in Outlook

After the fix completes, open Outlook and let it sync. Every email now displays its original received date. Sorting by date works correctly again. The mailbox's chronological order is restored, as if the migration had never touched the timestamps.

Platform-Specific Guides for MigrationWiz

Redate.io provides detailed fix guides for every platform affected by MigrationWiz migrations:

Frequently Asked Questions

Does BitTitan offer a date fix feature?

No. BitTitan MigrationWiz doesn't include a post-migration date correction feature. The MigrationWiz documentation doesn't address the date issue, and BitTitan support typically directs users to switch the Outlook view to "Sent" date as a workaround. This doesn't fix the underlying data.

Can Redate.io fix dates months after the MigrationWiz migration?

Yes. The original "Date" header is preserved inside each email indefinitely. Redate.io can fix dates no matter how much time has passed since the migration. Whether the migration was completed last week or two years ago, the fix works the same way.

What about MigrationWiz migrations between Google Workspace and Microsoft 365?

Redate.io fixes dates on the destination platform, no matter where the emails came from. Whether MigrationWiz moved mailboxes from Google Workspace to Microsoft 365, from Exchange to Google Workspace, or any other direction, Redate.io identifies the MigrationWiz "Received" header and corrects it. The fix works on any IMAP-compatible destination.

Ready to fix MigrationWiz dates? Start a free scan to see exactly how many emails are affected in each mailbox. The scan is free, takes just a few minutes, and requires no technical knowledge.