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The original was posted on /r/selfhosted by /u/esiy0676 on 2025-01-15 19:58:53+00:00.

Every now and then there’s a post about hosting or not hosting email per se. For sending out or delivering. This is NOT such one.

I am wondering what people use for storing emails, whether they got pulled or delivered or otherwise reached their system.

Suppose you have downloaded entire mailbox content off a service like Gmail, it comes as mbox. You can make it a Maildir. You can e.g. put Dovecot over it and have it available via IMAP to whichever clients, but it also makes it horrible to search within or organise.

You could perhaps forward it to something like Matrix (or Mattermost, etc.) via a bridge and get some of the database benefits, but then it’s not actionable, as an email and what about exports back to e.g. that mbox if need be one day.

So, how do you store your mailboxes, long-term?