this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2024
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Self-hostee storage for Gmail (lemmy.world)
submitted 2 months ago by thundermoose@lemmy.world to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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Not sure if there's a pre-existing solution to this, so I figured I'd just ask to save myself some trouble. I'm running out of space in my Gmail account and switching email providers isn't something I'm interested in. I don't want to pay for Google Drive and I already self-host a ton of other things, so I'm wondering if there is a way to basically offload the storage for the account.

It's been like 2 decades since I set up an email server, but it's possible to have an email client download all the messages from Gmail and remove them from the server. I would like to set up a service on my servers to do that and then act as mail server for my clients. Gmail would still be the outgoing relay and the always-on remote mailbox, but emails would eventually be stored locally where I have plenty of space.

All my clients are VPN'd together with Tailscale, so the lack of external access is not an issue. I'm sure I could slap something roughshod together with Linux packages but if there's a good application for doing this out there already, I'd rather use it and save some time.

Any suggestions? I run all my other stuff in Kubernetes, so if there's one with a Helm chart already I'd prefer it. Not opposed to rolling my own image if needed though.

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[–] stegosaur5491@lemm.ee 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I use the same setup as @conrad82@lemmy.world described. So selfhosted mail server and manual transfer via thunderbird.

If I get you right, you already have a similar setup. Then you are asking only for a automatic solution to transfer the emails from one account to another. Right?

Haven't tried it, but what about docker-mbsync? Or maybe you can put together an image like this on your own (cron job & simple email sync/transfer client, maybe mbsync or imapsync)?

Then you could sync all folders to your local account. In your email client you can use the imap settings from local account and smtp settings from gmail. You could even host your client too.

[–] thundermoose@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

It's really more of a proxy setup that I'm looking for. With thunderbird, you can get what I'm describing for a single client. But if I want to have access to those emails from several clients, there needs to be a shared server to access.

docker-mbsync might be a component I could use, but doesn't sound like there's a ready-made solution for this today.

[–] conrad82@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago

dovecot provides a proper shared imap server. But not all email clients allow moving emails between accounts (gmail and local email server), but Thunderbird does.

I can access the emails from any client