Hi all, I'm hoping that someone here might have some good advice for how to best archive my emails onto my unRAID machine. I have about ten different email addresses from a range of providers. On my daily-use computer I use Thunderbird to read and send emails, and the email providers' online storage for archiving my emails, however, given storage quotas, privacy, etc, I would like to backup/archive all of my emails locally to my unRAID server. Ideally I'd also like to be able to search and read these archives easily, say through an interface such as Thunderbird, and I'd prefer a solution running in a docker container.

 

I thought that my best option would be to have a program running in a docker container pull all of my emails from cloud storage using a one-way IMAP, so that I could then delete the emails off of the cloud storage without worrying about them being deleted locally. However, I'm open to other solutions as well. I tried just running a dockerized version of Thunderbird on my server with archiving set to a local folder, but I couldn't seem to get either of the existing docker images to work correctly. Any thoughts or suggestions? Thanks!

Curious about this as well, would like to accomplish the same (also making sure the email gets indexed so you are able to find stuff back :)). Tried mailpile docker (somehow not working for my @outlook.com email).
 

Nextcloud e-mail app is quite slow for me. 

 

Found a thunderbird docker and/or try Rainloop email client. No great solutions found yet.
 

I have not seen anything that does these things exactly as you want them.  The problem as I see it is that you want to use one program (like Thunderbird) for day to day use and then disconnect your backed up archive from Thunderbird to another program to view/search as an independent,  separate archive. 

 

Too complicated!

 

You'd be better off to set up your day to day use of Thunderbird to store messages offline (therefore creating your own backup archive within Thunderbird), and then backing up your entire Thunderbird profile to Unraid (not for viewing, just for backup purposes).  This is basically how I have mine set up.  Everything still exists within Thunderbird but I have a backup of my data.

 

You can have Thunderbird run your profile directly off of Unraid so that it's always in somewhat of a backed up state (parity), but I've found that having your profile actively running on an SMB share causes Thunderbird to run a bit slower.  I'm about to move my profile back to my local drive and only use Unraid for backup.  I tried running it this way so that I could access my email data from any computer, not just my main computer running Thunderbird.

 

Another thing I've tried and works generally fine is having Thunderbird running in a docker container and being able to access that instance of Thunderbird.  I did not use a specific Thunderbird docker though.  I used VNC Web Browser and manually installed Thunderbird on it, and copied in my existing profile data.  Then I can access Thunderbird from a web browser.  This works fine also but again is not exactly what you are looking to do.

 

I suppose you could configure two instances of Thunderbird to semi-accomplish what you want.  You have your day to day Thunderbird on PC and then this docker Thunderbird to keep an archive of your stuff -- but if you were to do that you might as well just keep everything on your PC Thunderbird to begin with.

 

I guess my question is why don't you guys just want to keep everything in your Thunderbird? It really makes everything easier and just works.

 

I'm open to any other thoughts, input, or ideas about this.. I myself am still trying to find what works best for me as far as running Thunderbird and maintaining data archives / accessibility on multiple pcs.

 

 

 

I know this is now an old topic, but has anyone tried to implement Mail Piler on a vm on Unraid? It seems like it might be a handy method of email archive, but I have yet to test it out.

 

pm

I have been trying for the past 3 days with no luck. See my post on r/Unraid:

 

https://www.reddit.com/r/unRAID/s/0YZxsjX71B

Any news here ?? Got synolgoy NAS and unRAID... as far as i found there is no simple automatated tool to just archive mirror imap mailboxes without creaitng mail server etc or with using thunderbird app on single pc ?

No. I'm going to give in to MailStore soon.