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Archiving private Mails in the background?

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blueprint1605
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Joined: 2021-10-14 12:41

Archiving private Mails in the background?

#1 Post by blueprint1605 »

Hello,

our Family uses an iPad to manage our IMAP mail accounts. Recently we lost mails due to accidental misuse and I only realized it by pure chance.
So I would like to archive our mail acconts automatically in the background using an unused computer with Debian 11 administrated by me.
Since I'm often away from home it would be nice to let the computer sleep most of the time and receive at least a daily summary for my mail account to know which mails are safe.
All mails (sent and received) should just be stored and never deleted, so we have the possibility to find and restore them later.
The biggest mail account is mine. It is used for years, has about 12000 mails and occupies almost 7 Gigabyte of IMAP storage.
So in everyday life there should be no large amounts of mails or traffic. Only the initial task may take some time.
I already pondered about a solution but I may overlook some hurdles. Maybe I should use Thunderbird and write an extension for the tasks...or maybe I should use an application to download all mails to a local Maildir and set up a mail server plus an email client to access the Maildir locally and read only?
OfflineIMAP was recommended to me but I'm sceptic since a maintainer writes on the main page that he is focusing on imapfw in the long term, but imapfw looks orphaned (2016). It's been a while since I made some basic tests with a mail server locally in a LAMP environment, so I hope that it's common to have events for processing mails created in any IMAP folder and the possibility to archive it and append a line with basic information (folder, sender, reveicer, subject, datetime) to a text file which is then sent later by a cronjob as a summary. Since Evolution seems to handle Maildir, it may work without a mail server, but then I would need to write a plugin for Evolution and in contrast to Mozilla web extensions I have no experience with Evolution.
I would appreciate your ideas, e.g. what applications and combination you would recommend and why...

Many thanks in advance
blueprint1605

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cds60601
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Re: Archiving private Mails in the background?

#2 Post by cds60601 »

Many of my devices use imap also. For mail archiving, I use T-bird with it set to NOT remove mails from the server (only after 6 months).
I have the pop side set to check mail every 20 mins or so since I read mails on other devices.
This works for me and has for many years. It's not a situation for everyone.
In addition to T-bird, I also have neomutt setup to do much the same only offline imap - again, not purging on the remote (server) as I remove them locally.
I have neomutt setup as I intend to stop uising T-Bird as a daily mail client, this is why I have both - for now

One thing to consider if you do offline imap, whatever client you opt to use, just ensure that it does not purge on the remote side, only the local (if you so choose).
YMMV
Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

blueprint1605
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Joined: 2021-10-14 12:41

Re: Archiving private Mails in the background?

#3 Post by blueprint1605 »

Hello,
cds60601 wrote: 2021-10-14 21:38 In addition to T-bird, I also have neomutt setup to do much the same only offline imap - again, not purging on the remote (server) as I remove them locally.
although neomutt rather seems to serve as an email client, your mentioning of it led me to "notmuch" during my research which seems to fit my needs in combination with "mbsync". But I'm thrilled that neomutt seems to be able to open a mailbox readonly and will take a closer look at this client later.
cds60601 wrote: 2021-10-14 21:38 One thing to consider if you do offline imap, whatever client you opt to use, just ensure that it does not purge on the remote side, only the local (if you so choose).
True words! As a further precaution I created a new mailbox with test emails, so I can riskless test the setup before I switch to my important main account.

Thank you very much for your help.

Best regards
blueprint1605

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Re: Archiving private Mails in the background?

#4 Post by cds60601 »

I'm going to add a little post here based on my personal experience with Neomutt with the hopes you wont fall into this as you move onward - For about 9 months now I had an anomaly when using Neomutt and switching accounts.

From time to time it would seg fault and quit. For the life of my I could determine the issues. Even with setting the logging to -l 5, it wasn't giving a hint where to look (well, it did - but turned out to be off the beaten path and wasn't related).
Long story short, as I went though and revamped my now several year old mutt config files, I noticed that at some point in time, I must have edited the section in the configs that define the colors for pretty much every thing.
There were a few lines that were cut off and were not dealt with accordingly. Keep this in mind while you work with Neomutt/Mutt.

Today I removed a bunch of redundancy and did what I should have done long ago, that was to define separate files for things like color, macros, etc. Not only does it make diagnosing issues easier, it's just plain sexy to look at too.
So - just a heads up that even one out of place character in configs can cause lots of pain down the road - YMMV
Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

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