I’m wondering if there is a plan to have a full-fledged e-mail client that will grab, remove and keep emails locally.
Context:
I’d like to use Nextcloud for “everything”! I would greatly appreciate to have my e-mails stored on my server. I wanted to host my own mail server but without a fixed IP address, I would still need a relay. I might go this route anyway but as of now, if the client could store e-mails locally, it would be a very much acceptable solution.
Here are the advantages I see to storing emails locally (on my Nextcloud server):
1 - Speed. Can’t beat 10GB fiber with my 50mbps cable that’s for sure. As-is we’re also dependent on the external server’s speed to receive, process and send back the info on every click. Even though I gave 200GB of ram, 5TB of space and 16 Cores to Nextcloud, I can’t speed that up on my own.
2 - Reliability. If my internet provider goes down, I have no access to my e-mails.
3 - Efficiency. Have a local “copy” (although I would suppress the one hosted on the remote server, if this was an option) is way more efficient network-wise than having back-and-forth transfers every time I select a message.
I made a suggestion about 6 months ago regarding the dark mode and it’s been working super great since then. IMO, the app is perfectly useable “interface-wise”.
I will take the opportunity to underline my appreciation for your system. I cannot believe that such a quality product (Nextcloud as a whole) is given out to the public in this self-centered “commercial” age and I am extremely grateful for the work you guys put in it.
With the cloud boom, people tend to leave messages on servers (gmail), but, as stated in my original post, the goal of my instance of nextcloud is to have data locally.
Although I am guessing you have a strong opinion on the subject, “full fledged” (POP) e-mails client ALWAYS stored e-mails locally. From Govt. instances to privately owned company, I have moved enough mailboxes to know for a fact emails were stored locally!
Since my word doesn’t mean much if it’s not backed by tangible information, here is a couple examples of such clients storing e-mails locally.
Locally as in “LAN” (Local area network). In case the details are of any importance, it’s an HP DL380 offering 32 cores, 200GB RAM and 62 drive bays through 2 external SAS.
Again, IMAP protocol, just like POP, allows downloading (and deleting) e-mails from a server and most e-mail clients support this feature. Clients supporting POP always have this feature since POP relies on it by design. I mentioned it to give a better understanding of my requirements since it didn’t seem to be clear from my OP. I did not wish to argue which protocol is best.
Now from the answers I got so far, I understand that (surprisingly) nobody is interested in this feature (storing their e-mails locally). I’m guessing people looking for that feature do not wish to have an external server at all anyway and configure a local MX server, which is probably the route I will take.
I would install a MDA (i.e. Dovecot) on the HP DL380 and Fetchmail or better, use Getmail to fetch messages from a remote IMAP server to your LAN server.
With a dynamic IP-address forget about installing a local MX server (MTA): Nowadays at least 80% of receiving MTA’s will reject messages coming from dynamic residential IP blocks. Furthermore you will not be able to configure reverse DNS and PTR on dynamic IP-addresses. Install and configure a MTA as a smarthost instead.
@Tamsy thanks for detailed, helpful response. I knew a local MX server was a challenge; that’s why I am looking at alternatives. I have now switched to Starlink (satellite) ISP so not only it’s dynamic, but it’s also CGNAT (double nat). IPv6 isn’t supported either (I could make it pseudo-working, but that’s unsupported and unsustainable anyway). My “initial thought” was to have a local server and use a relay (so that all my sent mail wouldn’t end up in junk folders).
Getmail seems like a perfect solution for my use case. I’ll read into MTA though as this is something I haven’t heard about yet (MailerQ seems to be the first hit I’m getting on the topic).
This is bad news. How do you want to check on incoming messages if you are outside of your LAN? You could configure Getmail to leave a copy of incoming messages on that outside server but this would miss the security/privacy aspect of your idea to have all email on the LAN side only
I know… My plan so far is to use Cloudflare’s tunnel system (Argo). I use it for Nextcloud and it works as expected. It’s a bit more pain to configure but at least it works!
As for the server itself, I’ve looked into different solutions and got a few tabs open. I found this project which seems to be interesting but I’ll have to dig a bit (or maybe I’ll just wing it on a VM and see what happens) dovecot-getmail
I’m waiting for an app nextcloud with pop( that is not dead )
My solution is, on my computer, in thunderbird to change the locla dirctory and put a nextcloud one
So that my emails are kept in nextcloud
And not in my provider servers
I am too waiting or rather looking for an email client allowing pop/pop3 protocols.
My email hosting provider allows 100MB storage only. I (& my users) have to use Google (Gmail) or Outlook (Online) type service provider to fetch the inbox items to keep that 100MB space free & then access the emails from Gmail or Outlook (depending on which one I am using).
All previous emails (Downloaded via pop3) stays available in Gmail or such so they stay always accessible.
Now this can be done via self-hosted web mail clients but that means setting up / maintenance and running another set of software when Nextcloud does have support for some of these email clients, why wont they allow pop3?
I am sure, I am not the only one with a smaller mailbox at email server’s end. So it’s mandatory for me (or for my users) to free up the email storage. Local PC based email clients are not an option since they are not available always online like Nextcloud based email client.
I also planned to use POP3. I want to receive all my emails via my hosting account and that spamfilter.
Next I wanted to use Nextcloud to use POP3 and store all that data that I just don’t want to have on my hostingaccount.
I only check these mailboxes via webmail, so nextcloud would be perfect to do this, IF it supported POP3.
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