this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2026
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Selfhosted

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E-mail archive browser for gmail takeout files (.mbox) (piefed.ca)
submitted 2 days ago by gedfromgont@piefed.ca to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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I have started moving away from gmail and have started exporting my older e-mails via the takeout option. This generates .mbox files. I don't really use any e-mail clients on my computer and do most of my e-mailing on my phone, so I don't have a way of viewing/searching those files.

Therefore I was wondering if there is any selfhosted option for some kind of e-mail archive/viewer with decent search function that anyone can recommend? Specifically something capable of handling those .mbox files. I found a few projects that sounded promising, but they seemed either dead, weren't setup for selfhosting or could only connect directly to the mailboxes. So I thought I'd ask here if anyone has experience with this, maybe some recommendations?

Also open to alternative approaches what to do with those files. I just would like to delete these mails from gmail entirely, but that requires I can search them with as much ease as I can on gmail with a local option.

Thanks!

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[–] gedfromgont@piefed.ca 4 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Would that be simple to do though? Hope I am not starting yet another discussion thread about selfhosting e-mail, I know there are different views how hard/easy it is. I guess here its restricted to just the viewing part, which is maybe the easier bit.

Downside I see for this, I'd like to also be able to access this on my computer, where I use webmail only. So I got no client set up. Yes, can of course do this just for that use case, but its again something extra I don't need otherwise. Also, on the phone I use Thunderbird, it seems to have an atrocious search function. So that wouldn't feel great to use either.

But definitely a valid idea I didn't consider, thanks!

[–] curbstickle_lw@lemmy.world 6 points 2 days ago

The hard part is making sure your email server works with others.

Standing up an email server that is otherwise inactive aside from login? Perfectly easy, no send involved.

[–] mbirth@lemmy.ml 6 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

dovecot/dovecot and solr should do the trick. At least they do for me.

EDIT: Two advantages of this setup for me: I can easily drag&drop emails from my other email accounts to this "archive" account in Thunderbird. And once I want to "seal" an archive folder, I can gzip the underlying mbox file and make it read-only (dovecot needs to be configured to store mails in mbox files).