Well I set up my email server thru cloudflare and managed to receive emails directly to my basement server. I could live with this and the various security threats incoming thru my unifi. But one thing is for sure, my wife won’t have any of it. She’s a total backwards thinking give me windows or I’ll jump kind of Gal. So I found that I could run a dockerized Thunderbird instance and I thought … Wow! I can just login to it from my computer or my phone, Surely this is it! I can have emails backed up from Gmail to my server and just access my server! And you know what? It works! I can access my Gmail on my browser! It’s beautiful!.. But then I login through my phone and wow! I can access my Gmail! Thru my phone! Except the interface is the same as my desktop. It’s literally a VNC to the server. I can login to it on my desktop and watch the mouse move as I move my finger on my phone! Great party trick, but…the text is microscopic. So is there another way to get IMAP and SMTP interface to Gmail, archiving all emails on my own server? I literally don’t want any of my emails to live on a Gmail server, but I want to be able to send receive and search emails I previously passed through Gmail but now live on my server.
Not sure why all the complexity. I just set my Gmail account to forward to an address on my self-hosted domain, and set it to delete after. Then I can check my “gmail” using standard IMAP on my own server (I also run RainLoop for a webmail interface). Sending mail back through Gmail is more complex, though, since Google put some protections on it to prevent spam. Since I don’t have to send from my Gmail account very often, I just log in to the web interface those rare times I need to do it.
But then I don’t get all the previous mail forwarded. I have to go get zip files and such.
You can use Thunderbird to copy your old messages from your Gmail account to your self-hosted IMAP.