Offline email syncing

with bonus email wrangling



Will never do for sending mail; that is too much work. I am happy to take a security hit by getting some email provider to do it for me; If the feds want to read my email they can do it there.

However, I might want to slightly reduce my risk profile by keeping my email offline and syncing locally. i.e. I might want to serve my mailboxes e.g. over IMAP, or even as local .mbox/Maildir/etc files. For more on that see email offline.

Once I have set this up, I could use a standard mail client or even run a local webmail client.

Offline sync/archiving

Can I sync files and IMAP?

offlineIMAP

OfflineIMAP is a GPLv2 software to dispose your mailbox(es) as a local Maildir(s).

For example, this allows reading the mails while offline without the need for your mail reader (MUA) to support disconnected operations.

OfflineIMAP will synchronize both sides via IMAP.

Generic files

SQL

This feels like a stupid idea. Do a really need to run a generic server process to index a lot of files if they are mail? I can store a lot of non-mail documents as files and it works pretty well in the modern world.

Mailpiler is a webserver which provides a front-end to a MySQL index of all your emails. Is that what you want? Are you spending your time wisely?

Or get even fancier: mikegioia/libremail: IMAP âžť SQL syncing engine, JavaScript-free email client, and a Kanban-style email client.

Without checking, I bet these two apps use distinct idiosyncratic SQL schemas to store the mail.

Incoming

notmuch

If you’ve been looking for a fast, global-search and tag-based email system to use within your text editor or in a terminal…

If you’re the kind of person that gets excited about being able to write shell scripts for exploring and manipulating your email…

If you’re a developer of an existing email program and would love a good library interface for fast, global search with support for arbitrary tags…

If you want the convenience of fast, reliable search of all your email, but don’t want to give a 3rd-party access to your email…

Then notmuch may be exactly what you’ve been looking for.


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