Not sure if there’s a pre-existing solution to this, so I figured I’d just ask to save myself some trouble. I’m running out of space in my Gmail account and switching email providers isn’t something I’m interested in. I don’t want to pay for Google Drive and I already self-host a ton of other things, so I’m wondering if there is a way to basically offload the storage for the account.
It’s been like 2 decades since I set up an email server, but it’s possible to have an email client download all the messages from Gmail and remove them from the server. I would like to set up a service on my servers to do that and then act as mail server for my clients. Gmail would still be the outgoing relay and the always-on remote mailbox, but emails would eventually be stored locally where I have plenty of space.
All my clients are VPN’d together with Tailscale, so the lack of external access is not an issue. I’m sure I could slap something roughshod together with Linux packages but if there’s a good application for doing this out there already, I’d rather use it and save some time.
Any suggestions? I run all my other stuff in Kubernetes, so if there’s one with a Helm chart already I’d prefer it. Not opposed to rolling my own image if needed though.
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it’s possible to have an email client download all the messages from Gmail and remove them from the server. I would like to set up a service on my servers to do that and then act as mail server for my clients. Gmail would still be the outgoing relay and the always-on remote mailbox, but emails would eventually be stored locally where I have plenty of space.
Do you really need this extra server? Why not just configure the account on Thunderbird and move the older / archival mail to a local folder? Or even drag and drop it out of Thunderbird to a folder and store the resulting files somewhere?
I’m just asking this because most people won’t need regular access to very old email and just storing the files on a NAS or something makes it easier.
I’m not the OP but I like how you are thinking. Might look into this idea myself.
I’ve setup exactly what you’ve described. Some of the stories of people suddenly losing access to their Google accounts scared me enough that I wanted a copy of all my emails locally in case the same thing happened to me.
I setup an IMAP email server using Dovecot which I can access over my Tailnet from various client machines. I use Getmail on the server to periodically poll Gmail every few minutes for any new messages via POP access. Anything new is downloaded and dumped in the user’s inbox.
It’s a pretty solid setup - I’ve been using it for years.
I wrote this ansible role to setup dovecot IMAP server. Once a year I move all mail from the previous year from various mailboxes to my dovecot server (using thunderbird).
Not sure if it fits you, but personally I have set up a self hosted dovecot instance where i have moved old gmail emails to, using thunderbird as the client.
I think there is a possibility to have a local client using Gmail, with a rule set to delete mails on Gmail as soon as they are synced locally. So in this case Gmail would be nothing more than a relay/proxy, while your mails would actually be offline.
You can access Gmail over IMAP and pull down messages locally. If you do this; Back. Up. Your. Mbox.
Also, fun fact, you can move messages from a local mbox to Gmail while preserving read status and original dates if you want to add old email to Gmail for some reason.
