this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2026
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E-mail archive browser for gmail takeout files (.mbox) (piefed.ca)
submitted 1 day 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 1 day ago (2 children)

Not convenient. My computer is actually a docked Steamdeck I only use occasionally in Desktop mode. I know lots of people will frown at that, but I do 99% of anything I do (aside from gaming), on my phone since a long time ago. For work I have a work laptop and I surely wouldn't want to store my mails there.

So having Thunderbird on my Steamdeck for browsing old e-mails is just not convenient for me.

My small homeserver is part of a backup strategy, so putting something on it reachable via a webUI of some sort will also ensure all of that is backed up. Since my Steamdeck is mostly games and many saves are stored in the cloud automatically, I don't back it up as much, not worth the effort.

[–] irmadlad@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

OK That's cool. Didn't know what your set up was like. So, scratch ~~Thunderbird~~. LOL

[–] passenger@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 day ago

I would recommend pika for easy backup, steamdeck (or even a windows pc) could have problems with cloud saves. If you want real backups you should set up deduplicated archives. This means you just install pika and click a couple times. You can set it to backup over ssh. The deduplicated compressed backup is often smaller than source data size even if it has years of archives.