slumberingcat

@gedfromgont@piefed.ca
So there's two different ways of archiving/backing up your email. (Ignoring proprietary stuff like Microsoft 365) IMAP is popular for keeping inboxes in sync if you're still using them. Of course IMAP is used for third-party email clients as well. But I imagine this as something you use while you transition if you're using both your new and old email account/s.

Then we have the file formats (both IMAP and file archives are supported by the above). Normally these are what you get when you export from a service. The most common are:

- PST - Proprietary and made by Microsoft. Used in all the Micrsofty/Windowsy things.

- EML - Seems more commonly used by email clients than by mail services themselves. Used for individual emails.

- Mbox - A common one by the looks. Unlike EML this one is used for entire email accounts. As far as I can tell by default it doesn't export folders, it's just one big message dump (so that's one benefit for IMAP over files). This is what Gmail provides via Google Takeout. I exported an account into Mbox to play around with.

- Maildir - This isn't a file format. It's actually just a way of storing email as files on your file system instead of using a database. It's come up a few times and I thought I'd mention it here until I get a better grasp of the landscape.

I imagine you'd take this route if you're going to switch immediately and don't want to maintain an old account for a while. Regardless if you manage to export in to one of these formats or have IMAP access (which Gmail does) I think you're pretty good to go.

One thing the IMAP + archival has going for it is that it can keep your storage usage low so you can use cheaper/free plans.

I want to explore non-self-hosted options next. I imagine Thunderbird can do most of what I was using those self-hosted services for. I would obviously go self-hosted route but this would probably be better for others. 2/2

@gedfromgont@piefed.ca These are my notes from around 6 months ago.

As part of my plan to move away from Gmail, I've been playing with Email Archival software today. I realised I didn't need to actually take my emails with me, I just wanted them archived/searchable somewhere. Weirdly a bunch of options came out after I formulated this plan earlier this year. Here's my quick thoughts on each:

- Mail Archiver - The first I tried and the only one I got working. Set up simple using docker compose, no weird configuration needed. I connected a Gmail account via IMAP and it just chugged along. Worked well. Picked up all my email. Attachments are imported too but one minor annoyance is that I can't preview mp3 files, only pdfs and some image formats. The search works but it's not that good, you kinda need to know what you're looking for.

- OpenArchiver - I looked at the docker compose and env file and immediately decided I couldn't be bothered. Does seem more enterprise focused so I bet a power user could get something out of this one.

- Bichon - Has a Twitter account and has an AI thing (DeepWiki) as a badge. There's some good features there though. It seems like they could rework a lot of their paid project (rustmailer) and built something they thought could be useful for others. It's just a single docker container. I didn't end up trying this one but I'll keep an eye on it.

- Eonvelope - I did try this one. Similar difficulty setting up to Mail Archiver. I liked that it talks about integrating with other self-hosted services like SearXNG or Paperless-NGX. I set it up but it was just throwing an error at me so I gave up. It's very new so I'll try it out again when it's baked a little longer.

So for now I'm going to go with Mail Archiver if I had to choose. 1/2