megaman

Yet another question about self-hosting email, but I haven't found the answer at least phrased in a way that makes sense with my question.

I've got ~15 GBs of old gmail data that I've already downloaded, and google is on my ass about "91% full" and we know I'm not about to pay them for storage (I'll sooner spend 100 hours trying to solve it myself before I pay them $3/month).

What I want is to have the same (or relatively close to the same) access and experience to find stuff in those old emails when they are stored on my hardware as I do when they are in my gmail. That is, I want to have a website and/or app that i search for emails from so-and-so, in some date-range, keywords. I don't actually want to send any emails from this server or receive anything to it (maybe I would want gmail to forward to it or something, but probably I'd just do another archive batch every year).

What I've tried so far, which is sort of working, is that I've set up docker-mailserver on my box, and that is working and accessible. I can connect to it via Thunderbird or K-9 mail. I also converted big email download from google, which was a .mbox, into maildir using mb2md (apt install mb2md on debian was nice). This gave me a directory with ~120k individual email files.

When I check this out in Thunderbird, I see all those emails (and they look like they have the right info) (as a side - I actually only moved 1k emails into the directory that docker-mailserver has access to, just for testing, and Thunderbird only sees that 1k then). I can do some searching on those.

When I open in K-9, it by default looks like it just pulls in 100 of them. I can pull in more or refresh it sort of thing. I don't normally use K-9, so I may just be missing how the functionality there is supposed to work.

I also just tried connecting to the mail server with Nextcloud Mail, which works in the sense that it connects but it (1) seems like it is struggling, and (2) is putting 'today' as the date for all the emails rather than when they actually came through. I don't really want to use Nextcloud Mail here...

So, I think my question here is now really around search and storage. In Thunderbird, I think that the way it works (I don't normally use Thunderbird much either) is that it downloads all the files locally, and then it will search them locally. In K-9 that appears to be the same, but with the caveat that it doesn't look like it really wants to download 120k emails locally (even if I can).

What I think I want to do, though, is have the search running on the server. Like I don't want to download 15GBs (and another 9 from gmail soon enough) to each client. I want it all on the server and just put in my search and the server do the query and give me a response.

docker-mailserver has a page for setting up Full-Text Search with Xapian, where it'll make all the indices and all that. I tinkered with this and think I got it set up. This is another sort of thing where I would want the search to be utilizing the server rather than client since the server is (hopefully) optimizing for some of this stuff.

Should I be using a different server for what I want here? I've poked around at different ones and am more than open to changing to something else that is more for what I need here.

For clients, should I be using Roundcube or something else? Will that actually help with this 'use the server to search' question? For mobile, is there any way to avoid downloading all the emails to the client?

Thanks for the help.

I installed pop!_os as my daily driver some months ago (completely got rid of windows) and have thought it pretty good. But something about it seemed off - it would take programs just too long to open, it wasn't snappy... Once I got into something it seemed to run fine (playing dota or something else was fine after initial quirks).

Well, today, figured it out...

When I did the first install, I was very nervous about deleting all of my existing data on my disks and so tried to manually partition everything so that I could get it right (I think I was also planning to dual-boot).

Fast forward to today, and I'm testing speeds on all the drives to see which one to pitch for a new one I acquired. I see the 3 HDDs, but where is the SSD... Oh god, I installed the boot partition and root and home all onto one of the ~12 year old HDDs and the SSD has been sitting idle.

Anyway, just about done with the new fresh install onto the SSD, hopefully it isn't too hard to start port over the home directory from that HDD...

An android messaging app that sends everything as an image where the text is in a blue bubble. All images, baby.

I've got my main house server that has a number of dockerized applications, including nextcloud-aio. Nextcloud-AIO comes with a built-in backup system using BorgBackups. I've had this running and doing my backups, it is probably fine. Notable, it does encrypt the backup.

Now, I recently setup a separate machine to use rsnapshot to backup the things from the main machine that need backing up. It is SSHing on a schedule to do that, and backing up the folders I've listed.

When I set that up, I skipped the nextcloud borg backup, because that is already backing up; however, it is not a remote backup, so is of limited use (granted, my 'official' backup computer is using about 18 inches away from the main server, so also of limited use).

I can easily just include the nextcloud-borg-directory on the rsnapshot list, but does anyone know if it will properly handle just the updates?

That is, both Borg and Rsnapshot are set up so that each backup isn't a complete backup but just incremental changes, so that you don't fill your whole disk in two weeks. But if Borg does that first on the nextcloud data, will rsnapshot just not work and then try to backup the full 50GBs every day? Or just do the incremental changes? Will the borg encryption jack up the ability of rsnapshot to see the changes?

If no one knows, I will just do it anyway and report back in a few days if my disk is completely full or not.

Edit: it has been ~4 days, and I think it is not all busted (not going to say it is a good idea). The total space it is taking up on the second (backup) machine is what I expect - it hasn't ballooned because it can't properly grok the borg backup format or anything like that. Importantly, this is after ~4 days and very few changes (updates/deletions/edits) to anything on the nextcloud.