Well I set up my email server thru cloudflare and managed to receive emails directly to my basement server. I could live with this and the various security threats incoming thru my unifi. But one thing is for sure, my wife won’t have any of it. She’s a total backwards thinking give me windows or I’ll jump kind of Gal. So I found that I could run a dockerized Thunderbird instance and I thought … Wow! I can just login to it from my computer or my phone, Surely this is it! I can have emails backed up from Gmail to my server and just access my server! And you know what? It works! I can access my Gmail on my browser! It’s beautiful!.. But then I login through my phone and wow! I can access my Gmail! Thru my phone! Except the interface is the same as my desktop. It’s literally a VNC to the server. I can login to it on my desktop and watch the mouse move as I move my finger on my phone! Great party trick, but…the text is microscopic. So is there another way to get IMAP and SMTP interface to Gmail, archiving all emails on my own server? I literally don’t want any of my emails to live on a Gmail server, but I want to be able to send receive and search emails I previously passed through Gmail but now live on my server.
If the emails live on your server, can’t you use software there to send, receive and search emails?
I’m going to try using round cube. If it can go into my own SMTP and IMAP it should be able to go into Google’s. But how do I archive/retrieve emails so they live only on my server after extraction from Google. I want to keep IMAP but not share my IMAP folders with Google.
You use an IMAP syncer, like this one:
http://www.offlineimap.org/
A word of caution: I professionally hosted email for over a decade.
90% or incoming email will be spam. Anti-spam tools will need regular updates. Backups are also super important.
All things considered, I don’t host my own email anymore although I know all the pieces involved.
There are also some independent email hosts that are good like Fastmail or for extra privacy, Proton Mail.