I have started moving away from gmail and have started exporting my older e-mails via the takeout option. This generates .mbox files. I don’t really use any e-mail clients on my computer and do most of my e-mailing on my phone, so I don’t have a way of viewing/searching those files.
Therefore I was wondering if there is any selfhosted option for some kind of e-mail archive/viewer with decent search function that anyone can recommend? Specifically something capable of handling those .mbox files. I found a few projects that sounded promising, but they seemed either dead, weren’t setup for selfhosting or could only connect directly to the mailboxes. So I thought I’d ask here if anyone has experience with this, maybe some recommendations?
Also open to alternative approaches what to do with those files. I just would like to delete these mails from gmail entirely, but that requires I can search them with as much ease as I can on gmail with a local option.
Thanks!
Curious as to why. Is it a security issue or is it just not convenient…
Thunderbird will import .mbox files but you’ll need a plugin called ImportExportTools NG.
Import:
Not convenient. My computer is actually a docked Steamdeck I only use occasionally in Desktop mode. I know lots of people will frown at that, but I do 99% of anything I do (aside from gaming), on my phone since a long time ago. For work I have a work laptop and I surely wouldn’t want to store my mails there.
So having Thunderbird on my Steamdeck for browsing old e-mails is just not convenient for me.
My small homeserver is part of a backup strategy, so putting something on it reachable via a webUI of some sort will also ensure all of that is backed up. Since my Steamdeck is mostly games and many saves are stored in the cloud automatically, I don’t back it up as much, not worth the effort.
OK That’s cool. Didn’t know what your set up was like. So, scratch
Thunderbird. LOLI would recommend pika for easy backup, steamdeck (or even a windows pc) could have problems with cloud saves. If you want real backups you should set up deduplicated archives. This means you just install pika and click a couple times. You can set it to backup over ssh. The deduplicated compressed backup is often smaller than source data size even if it has years of archives.
A nice, simple solution of having a file and an app that can read that file. Hard to believe people are suggesting setting up a whole e-mail server to read one file.
Was just recently trying to figure out how to browse my mbox backup, and wound up at the same solution.
I’m stunned that it’s part of a plugin, and not a standard feature. Didn’t see many other actively maintained programs that made it easy either.