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E-mail archive browser for gmail takeout files (.mbox) (piefed.ca)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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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!

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[–] 3 points 3 months ago (4 children)

My suggestion would be to stand up a mail server (that doesn't really do anything) and bring your mail over there. Then add the account on your phone, and you've got email now searchable like any other.

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  • [–] [S] 4 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    Would that be simple to do though? Hope I am not starting yet another discussion thread about selfhosting e-mail, I know there are different views how hard/easy it is. I guess here its restricted to just the viewing part, which is maybe the easier bit.

    Downside I see for this, I'd like to also be able to access this on my computer, where I use webmail only. So I got no client set up. Yes, can of course do this just for that use case, but its again something extra I don't need otherwise. Also, on the phone I use Thunderbird, it seems to have an atrocious search function. So that wouldn't feel great to use either.

    But definitely a valid idea I didn't consider, thanks!

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  • [–] 6 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

    dovecot/dovecot and solr should do the trick. At least they do for me.

    EDIT: Two advantages of this setup for me: I can easily drag&drop emails from my other email accounts to this "archive" account in Thunderbird. And once I want to "seal" an archive folder, I can gzip the underlying mbox file and make it read-only (dovecot needs to be configured to store mails in mbox files).

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