Email archive arrangement

Hi,

I’m looking for some ideas on how I could access my emails in the future. I’m currently using thunderbird as my email client. Opera and netscape in the past. And I’ve always uses POP to download the emails from the server to store them locally. I’ve got a lot of emails from a long time. I should do a clean up, but still I think I would like to keep them in some format.

I’m noticing that I usually read the emails on my phone nowadays and rarely open thunderbird. So I do not have access to the older emails from my phone (IMAP) since they are deleted from the server. My archive is in thunderbird.

I would prefer to have the emails stored locally rather than having them all on the server. Also they would probably need quite a lot of space. But I would like to have access to them from anywhere. How could I achieve this? I’m thinking of some self hosted “proxy” that would fetch the emails from the server and then I could access them with any client using IMAP. Or maybe there’s some simpler way?

Another option would be to archive the old emails for example yearly into some other format which I could access? Any ideas?

Thanks.

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Maybe @rogafe can help, they had a Devember project but I’m not sure if it is production ready. I really loved the idea, super useful.

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How big is your thunderbird archive?

Usually people will use something like dovecot+solr as their imap server with primary email stored in maildir format.

Maildir is not particularly efficient at storage or browsing nor quick to traverse.

So if you have lots and lots of email (e.g. 100G+) maybe you should look for a better solution. Since you mentioned thunderbird – maybe you don’t have that much because last I tried it, it fell appart after 5-10G, maybe it’s better these days, it be helpful to know.

My thunderbird profile takes 6.8G currently, but there’s some old newsgroups and rss-feeds that should be deleted.

Oh, Thank you @vivante. I will not call it production ready, but I still have interest in the project and if some people want to use it (maybe as a secondary backup role) and report bug to the GitHub and/or forum post I will be delighted

Rogafe

EDIT:

You could also use the project that inspired me imapbox by polo2ro https://github.com/polo2ro/imapbox it is a lot more stable albeit a little more slow

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