I just installed Nextcloud this morning on my Ubuntu home server. I’m playing around getting familiar with how things work. I setup the email module with my own domain (hosted by my domain provider). Everything works great, I made a submailbox folder and moved some test emails into that. Where on earth is that saved on my Ubuntu server? I can’t find where those emails are stored.
Hey @LoriM welcome to the community 
wow sounds great… well done!
so we can assume its a snap install then? post output of sudo snap list to be sure.
however, from your description your issue is more of an app issue than a Nextcloud issue right?
so the mail module you’re talking about, is that the Nextcloud mail app? if yes, then your “submailbox folder” will be a different mail account or an IMAP inbox subdirectory and will most certainly not be saved anywhere on your Ubuntu server! but don’t worry nothing is lost, its just not visible at the moment and we’ll get to the bottom of it finally 
these are all assumptions because you’ve forgotten to fill in the Support template. Please use this when you request support or else you’re leaving us kinda in the dark 
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Nextcloud Server version - This Nextcloud is on version 31.0.4
Operating system and version - Ubuntu Server 24.04
Web server and version - Apache version 2.4.58
Reverse proxy and version - N/A (don’t think I’m running this)
PHP version - 8.3
Is this the first time you’ve seen this error? (Yes / No): - N/A no error, more of a question… where are the files?
When did this problem seem to first start? N/A no problem
Installation method - These steps - https://mailserverguru.com/install-nextcloud-on-ubuntu-24-04-lts/
Are you using Cloudflare, mod_security, or similar? - No
Nextcloud mail app? if yes, = yes
then your “submailbox folder” will be a different mail account or an IMAP inbox subdirectory and will most certainly not be saved anywhere on your Ubuntu server.
Not an IMAP subdirectory, I created the submailbox folder inside the Nextcloud mail app and it didn’t sync back to my email host. The submailbox folder is present in the Nextcloud web email app and the two test emails I moved there are sitting in the folder.
Nextcloud is not a mail server. All of your email is saved in your mail account on your mail server. The mail app is more a web mail client without mail data.
I totally understand Nextcloud is not a mail server, and that’s OK… and I don’t want to run a mail server myself, it’s such a huge learning curve. I’m more interested in saving my emails locally. Thunderbird can save emails locally, I didn’t know if Nextcloud was or could do something similar. And just so you are aware, as soon as I moved the two emails out of my inbox they vanished from my mail server’s site. This is why I’m testing and asking questions, I don’t want to lose anything important. Thunderbird can easily do the local saving but you can’t access the instance from multiple devices… just looking for that Goldilocks solution.
yeah it seems daunting at first, just don’t give up… and keep asking questions
actually thunderbird only downloads mails when the mail account is/was POP3, modern mailboxes are IMAP so regardless which client you use, your IMAP mailbox should always look the same.
HI @LoriM is there anything to see in:
/apps/mail/api/mailboxes/
in your nextxloud folder
Like:
/var/www/nextcloud/apps/mail/api/mailboxes/
This could be the location.
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Hi @sambilanet , I poked around and nothing in those folders that would be the submailbox data. I appreciate your idea though…
Thinking about this after everyone has replied I realize that the Nextcloud email doesn’t do what I’m looking for. It works great, looks great and would be perfect if I had an IMAP setup with my email host, but I do not. What might work is if I set Thunderbird up on all my PCs and sync the data folder into Nextcloud to use on all the machines. I’m going to test that out as soon as I get my sync cleaned up. First one didn’t lay out the files as I expected so I need to see how best to clean that up. It’s a good thing I like to tinker with this stuff. lol
What do you mean with:
“if I had an IMAP setup with my email host, but I do not.”
What is your setup?
There is one (off)topic talking about:
I can’t say anything about syncing “Thunderbird” into Nextcloud. Please let us know.