Hello all, i am not sure if plain webmail is the right category for what i’m looking for.
I already have a mail server running in a hosting VPS that has been running for years and handles sending and receiving emails without issues or being flagged as spam, what I’m trying to accomplish is:
- Handling the storage of very old and large mailboxes (imap 20gb+) to my local server since my VPS is runing out of space.
- Continue using the VPS email server to receive/send emails. Since i’m not at all interested in selfhosting the email server and dealing with all those issues.
- Multiuser since several family members have the same issue.
- Selfhosted so we can check/send email from any device/mobile.
Something that works similar (but obviously not selfhosted) is adding a POP3 account to Gmail/Outlook/etc and then adding the “send mail as” SMTP credentials of the server. I would like to replicate the same but selfhosted if possible.
Is there anything that works like this?
Could run https://poste.io locally?
IMO, you’re overcomplicating things a lot. You already have a working mail server, which is not easy to setup and maintain. Adding another mail server and redistributing mail storage / routing mail between the two will drastically decrease stability and may affect deliverability of your mail as well.
Why not just add storage to the existing VPS? If your hosting provider doesn’t provide such option, you can mount third-party S3-compatible storage (rclone mount works great, a few hundred Gb on Backblaze cost virtually nothing) and store your mail there.
You may be correct and it looks like this might be the cleanest solution to my problem.
I could even try to mount my local storage using wireguard and NFS. But I imagine network issues or downtime while receiving mails could mean big trouble, but that’s only an issue if I selfhost the storage and not pay for third party storage.
In my mind i was so sure that something already existed that was both a webmail client and also supported local storage of email lol, for some reason still it just makes sense to me.
You could do what I did and move the mail server to a local machine or VM then use Wireguard on the VPS which tells iptables to route incoming mail traffic ports to the now local mail server. Then you can use as much space as you want.
How do you deal with outages on the local mail server VM do you queue mail?
What about sending mail as I know outbound smtp can be difficult to avoid getting spammed
Are you looking for a way to archive older mails like Mailstore ?