How to keep all email locally in a useful format that can be searched across devices?
How to keep all email locally in a useful format that can be searched across devices?
I have an account on an SMTP server. The server has a storage quota. I'd like the delete stuff from the server but keep it locally in case I need it. Just in case.
I'd like to be able to access the mail somehow on other computers and hopefully mobile devices on my network so that it can be searched when needed. I'm not sure what the best interface for that would be. A webmail client?
One option would be to use Thunderbird or another client to download the mail once in a while but disable deleting local messages when they are removed from the server. Would Thunderbird store the messages in a format I can use readily with other applications? Or should I use something else to download the mail?
What about situations where messages are moved from one folder to another on the server? Would I get a duplicate locally of the message appearing in both locations? Not sure how the storage and metadata actually are.
Also, is it possible in such a situation to put a message back on the server if I realize it was deleted in error?
Any idea would be welcome. I am a bit stuck.
I can use the command line comfortably but ideally I'd have a solution that doesn't rely on the terminal to find find messages and such. I don't really like terminal mail clients.
I'd say run a local imap server rather than dealing with the weirdness of storage shares across multiple OS's.
I still have every email I've ever received, going back now more than 20 years. My solution isn't terribly fancy, but it gets the job done.
I have a Synology here at home running a mail server. You don't need a Synology specifically, just a simple mail server with access to a lot of disk space. The server isn't on the Open web or anything and doesn't support SMTP. It's just running IMAP to serve the local mail around the house.
I connect to it from Thunderbird on my various machines. I also use Thunderbird to connect to my actual mail servers to do my day-to-day mail stuff.
Every six months or so, I move old mail messages from my actual mail servers over to the archival one. Generally, I keep the mail on the archival server in folders; one per year, that keeps the loading time to a minimum. For example, come January 1st 2024, I'll be moving mail from January 2023 - June 2023 to the
/2023folder on the archive.Searching is done via Thunderbird just like you search any mail account, and on my desktop machine, I let Thunderbird keep copies of the mail locally for quick searching. On my laptop though, I ask it to not keep copies to save disk space.
@danielquinn @crank That's pretty cool. How much storage does 20 years of personal emails actually take up?
In looking up suggestions made already I found 2 other projects that might be useful. Does anyone have comments about these? I have just looked at them a little bit.
OfflineIMAP
OfflineIMAP is software that downloads your email mailbox(es) as local Maildirs. OfflineIMAP will synchronize both sides via IMAP.
There are a few different overlapping projects by same developer(s). It is a bit messy.
- OfflineIMAP/offlineimap3 - I think this repo is the one with the most active and up to date version of the software
- OfflineIMAP - ArchWiki
- Home · OfflineIMAP/offlineimap Wiki
imapsync
Imapsync is an IMAP transfer tool. The purpose of imapsync is to migrate IMAP accounts or to backup IMAP accounts.
Imapsync is a command-line tool that allows incremental and recursive IMAP transfers from one mailbox to another, both anywhere on the internet or in your local network. Imapsync runs on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X. "Incremental" means you can stop the transfer at any time and restart it later efficiently, without generating duplicates.
- imapsync home page
- Mailbox Imapsync Online
- Imapsync issues and tips about archiving - FAQ.Archiving.txt
- Imapsync similar softwares and external services - if there is an answer it is probably here. Looks pretty comprehensive.
So I think the way I would want to do this is with something like mailpiler (https://www.mailpiler.org/). It’s been on my long list of things to dive into for a while.
Well it is literally exactly what I was asking for. :) But as you allude to the setup is not trivial and would be a bit of a project. It is useful to know about because it could help find a somewhat simpler alternative. And I will add it to my own list in case I find none.
edit:
Led me to
polo2ro/imapbox: Dump imap inbox to a local folder in a regular backupable format: html, json and attachements. Which is a different take on the same problem. I am not sure if I like the email all being converted to html like this. It could be a really nice addition but somehow I feel that keeping more original-formatted emails would be wise too. It does also create for each message "A gziped version of the email in .eml format" alongside the html but I would have to look more into what can be done with that.
It is the POP3 workflow, not IMAP. Maybe setup your client to use POP3 and remove mails from server after receiving? However I don't recommend Thunderbird, its POP3 support was very buggy when I used it (many years ago). Try Sylpheed or Claws Mail, for example.
Thunderbird has actual funding now, so please test before advising against software
It is not the question of funding. Thunderbird has always had a number of long standing bugs. Speaking about such rare use cases, I don't think someone care about them. Anyway, I recommend using software that I know it worked correctly, not that worked incorrectly and could be fixed but requires further testing.
I want to keep mail on the server at about 80-90% of quota. Because when I am outside of my home, that will continue to be what I have access to. So the local copy will only be as a backup in case I delete something that I later realize I need to refer to. Since most emails are very small individually I should be able to keep the majority of them on the server. I will selectively delete either very large emails, or emails which there are so, so many of like notifications, which I will probably never need to look at.
I have used Sylpheed a bit in the past. I prefer it and a very similar project called Interlink to tbird. I just said tbird because I figured everyone would know it. But also I thought all of those were forks of tbird and wouldn't differ much in how they work. Do they have much different internals?
You are wrong, there are no widely used forks of Thunderbird AFAIK. Thunderbird is based on Mozilla and has a huge codebase that is very hard to maintain. All other popular email clients have totally different code and based on other libraries. They can be similar in how they appear, but not in what bugs they have.
Look into isync / mbsync in combination with maildir utils (mu/mu4e) or notmuch.
Thanks I am looking at these. Do you think maildir format is the best to try to work with? When I was researching I find there are other formats such as mbox, or more program-specific formats. I was not having an easy time discerning which is the most portable, robust format.
What I do is use Claws Mail with POP3, it has an option that allows a message to only be deleted from the server after a configurable period of time. So if you set it for 10 days for example the message will exist both locally on your PC and on the server for 10 days, after which it will only exist on the PC.
It works pretty well in general. The only account giving me some trouble is Yahoo, which I suspect has some quirks, which occasionally cause the messages to be downloaded again and duplicated. Thankfully it's easily fixed because Claws also has a feature to delete duplicates.
This approach is different from IMAP, which would maintain a local offline cache of the live inbox, but you wouldn't be able to only keep local messages — any change in one side would be reflected in both.
However, Claws allows you to do both. You can have both a POP3 and an IMAP account connected to the same live box use the POP3 for offline archival, and the IMAP for when you want to put something back on the server, or if you need to look at other folders on the server besides inbox (POP3 cab only see the inbox, not trash, sent etc.)
Normally I only do folders locally on the PC, on the mailbox connected with POP3, so none of the organization is reflected on the live mailbox, which is inbox only. Every once in a while I connect via IMAP to recover emails from the sent folder, which I've sent with webmail or from mobile (using IMAP on mobile too).
If this doesn't fit your workflow turn there are lots of IMAP syncing tools like you've noticed. IMAPsync is pretty good.
The last step for my workflow would be to self host an IMAP server that will index the POP3 mailbox, and expose it read-only (without SMTP) through a webmail app, for archival and search only. I may have to look at Piler. The quirk here is that the Claws mailbox format is slightly different from IMAP, it's very similar to mbox but not identical, will have to see if any IMAP server will accept it.
Thunderbird is no go unfortunately, its main box format is to keep all messages on one big file instead of individual files, which complicates things a lot.