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!

  • gedfromgont@piefed.caOPEnglish
    4·
    2 days ago

    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.

    • passenger@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      2·
      1 day ago

      I 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.