I’m thinking of putting all my email archive (55k messages, about 6 GB) on a private IMAP server but I’m wondering how to access it remotely when needed.
Obviously I’d need a webmail client but is there any that can deal with that amount of data and also be able to search through To, From, Subject and body efficiently?
I can also set up a standalone search engine of some sort (the messages are stored one per file in regular folders) but then how do I view the message once I locate it?
I can also expose the IMAP server itself and see if I can find a mobile app that fits the bill but I’d rather not do that. A webmail client would be much easier to reverse proxy and protect.
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Roundcube should work pretty well for you: https://roundcube.net/
+1 An old ISP of mine still uses RoundCube for their webmail, so if it’s good enough for them, it’s good enough for self hosters.
My company uses Roundcube for Webmail and offers Thunderbird as a native client. It’s always great to see free software in a corporate environment.
Obviously I’d need a webmail client
Why “obviously”? Plenty of open source, high quality email clients for desktop and mobile, and I can not think of any scenario nowadays where you’d be willing to access your email from an untrusted device anyway.
for myself I find the existing android clients far from adequate. if you have filters, folders, identities etc it is a fuck tonne of set up. last time i tried i just gave up.
Give FairEmail a look…
+1, I fucking love FE. It’s the standard for a quality client on mobile. I prefer it to thunderbird on desktop.
The biggest problem is you have to set up every device independently with accounts, senders, signatures, and have one device online all the time to apply rules. It’s a lot of work to keep 3 mail clients all set up the same. Especially when clients all have their own bugs (ie; thunderbird has a CalDAV bug that makes it forget your password).
We need essentially self hosted gmail, where you have a web client for PC use and an app for mobile, mail is processed server-side, and settings are all automatically the same across clients.
Do you have a client you like for desktop? Thunderbird is not great, it’s slow and buggy.
Thunderbird is good enough for me I guess. I don’t think it is slow, it handles my multiple accounts just fine. I don’t have an overly complex email tbh, so my biggest requirements are only (a) how fast can I archive things (b) how easy it is to find things by searching. I also used evolution for a while, but thought it was doing more than I needed so I never cared about digging in deeper.
I use SnappyMail (a fork of Rainloop) for my IMAP webmail client.
With IMAP, everything stays on the server, so the client doesn’t have to worry about the inbox size. Searching is also done server-side, so the client just needs to send a query.
The performance will ultimately come down to the performance of your IMAP server.
I installed k-9 mail / Thunderbird on my android phone and set it to sync all emails, so I have local copy on my phone
I’ve setup Dovecot and Solr in Docker containers for the IMAP end. Solr provides a fulltext search for Dovecot. I’ve also configured a virtual “All Mail” folder that shows all the messages on the server - to help with clients that don’t support search in all folders.
As webmail client, I’m using SnappyMail and let it search the “All Mail” folder.
See also: https://blog.cloudron.io/email-search-in-mail-clients/
Roundcube
can u export the mail to file(s) ?
It’s already in files. I’m looking for something that will let me search and view the files remotely. Something better than logging in with ssh and grepping and looking at the raw mails. Which is still useful in a pinch but gets tedious when you need to read an attachment, or when the message was HTML.
Do you mean like neomutt, mu4e etc kinds?
sry. didnt read carefully.
nnn (tui file manager) would be an interesting solution. i know its not really perfect but you can interactively select and view files.
