Not sure if there’s a pre-existing solution to this, so I figured I’d just ask to save myself some trouble. I’m running out of space in my Gmail account and switching email providers isn’t something I’m interested in. I don’t want to pay for Google Drive and I already self-host a ton of other things, so I’m wondering if there is a way to basically offload the storage for the account.
It’s been like 2 decades since I set up an email server, but it’s possible to have an email client download all the messages from Gmail and remove them from the server. I would like to set up a service on my servers to do that and then act as mail server for my clients. Gmail would still be the outgoing relay and the always-on remote mailbox, but emails would eventually be stored locally where I have plenty of space.
All my clients are VPN’d together with Tailscale, so the lack of external access is not an issue. I’m sure I could slap something roughshod together with Linux packages but if there’s a good application for doing this out there already, I’d rather use it and save some time.
Any suggestions? I run all my other stuff in Kubernetes, so if there’s one with a Helm chart already I’d prefer it. Not opposed to rolling my own image if needed though.
Bit of a different solution:
If Paperless-NGX is one of the things you self-host; it has options to import emails based on your specified criteria, then you could have it delete each piece of mail it imports. You can also just have it move mail to folders on the mail server, or just tag/flag mail instead of deleting it. (for you to then manually delete at your leisure)
I use this to automatically import receipts, bills, work documents, and any other regular mail instead of dealing with it manually every week/month.
I’ve never noticed that in the docs! That’s pretty cool. I’ll have to try set it up sometime.
Not sure if it fits you, but personally I have set up a self hosted dovecot instance where i have moved old gmail emails to, using thunderbird as the client.
I wrote this ansible role to setup dovecot IMAP server. Once a year I move all mail from the previous year from various mailboxes to my dovecot server (using thunderbird).
Do they need to be the same mailbox?
Could you have a ‘live’ and ‘archive’ split?
If you could, then I’d use something like imapsync to make a complete mirror copy, and then delete all email older than whatever the age is that makes them outside of your usual working set, and bam, done.
The problem you’re going to have is there’s a LOT of tools that can sync imap->imap, but they’re more migration or backup tools and won’t let you delete the email from gmail afterwards while maintaining a usable archive, which I think is a requirement to solve your issue.
I’ve setup exactly what you’ve described. Some of the stories of people suddenly losing access to their Google accounts scared me enough that I wanted a copy of all my emails locally in case the same thing happened to me.
I setup an IMAP email server using Dovecot which I can access over my Tailnet from various client machines. I use Getmail on the server to periodically poll Gmail every few minutes for any new messages via POP access. Anything new is downloaded and dumped in the user’s inbox.
It’s a pretty solid setup - I’ve been using it for years.
