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Is there a self-hosted email client with push notifications? (pawb.social)

submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by Mora@pawb.social to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world

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I currently use two mail clients: Betterbird (Thunderbird with additional bugfixes) on Linux [PikaOS] & FairEmail on Android. I have numerous folders because of server-side sieve filtering, which mostly creates structures like //. While it works, FairEmail is a battery drain when fetching all folders (I assume because there is no FetchAll in IMAP) and both are rather slow. Thunderbird especially also kind of sucks at picking up newly created folders.

So now my line of thought was to have a self-hosted email client/web app, which would eliminate these two main issues. Instead of an FairEmail/Betterbird, I would like to use a PWA. I would appreciate it if it had some offline caching, though. A must is push notifications on my android device (ideally through some proxy or UnifiedPush, so I don’t have to expose the client to the WWW). Another needed feature is the ability to send from any email associated to my domain. I would run it on a local server & access it via VPN. PGP client support would be neat as well, though I currently do not use it.

To clarify: I am not looking to host a mail server & I am not looking to host a desktop app. I am looking for something like Rainloop, but it needs to download the mails from multiple providers, automatically pick up new folders & send notifications (via browser, ntfy, gotify, etc) when something arrives and obviously the UI needs to work on Desktop and Android.

Does anyone have any recommendations in this regard? 🙂

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[–] just_another_person@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

The point of a mail server is that many clients can connect to it and get what they need. What I'm reading here is that you want to disregard the ability to already do that in favor of having all your mail funneled through a self-hosted 'something' that just sends push notifications to your mobile...but then you'd still have to have your mobile mail client go and download all this mail you said is a battery drain, so you're sort of negating yourself.

Now...the real crux of the problem you're describing is simply that your mobile mail client is not very efficient, so why wouldn't you just solve for that instead? Create a better workflow for your mail so your client doesn't need to IMAP crawl EVERYTHING, or reduce the frequency it syncs maybe.

If that's still not enough, depending on your mail host (which you didn't mention), there are ways to simply subscribe to push notifications from their service more than likely if that's all you want.

[–] Mora@pawb.social 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

but then you’d still have to have your mobile mail client go and download all this mail you said is a battery drain, so you’re sort of negating yourself.

That is precisely my point. I do not want a mobile or desktop client anymore. Just a client which is running on a system which is always running anyway to send me a notification and I can then decide if I will check it out now or if it can wait.

Proprietary mobile clients often work similarly, they do the "heavy lifting" on the server side, send a notification, but only temporarily load the mails you explicitly view temporarily on the device. And thus, they use less battery and storage of the device. Another benefit for the unified client would be faster sync of mail status (e.g. read/unread) as it is only one client on the IMAP server instead of one on each device. And another benefit would be not having to migrate email clients when replacing devices.