Ask HN: WebMail packages for personal use

Posted by jason_slack on Monday September 27, 2010 @10:19AM
from the ask-hn dept.

I want to start storing my e-mal in a MySQL backend and I am looking for a webmail package that I can run on OS X that will accomplish this.

I know that Zimbra is very RAM intensive. I am sure that asking for something like GMail is out of the question as well.

Thoughts?

Updated: More Reasoning: I have about 8gb of e-mail (compressed) over the course of the last 10 years. Sure some of it could be cleaned out to reduce the over all size. But I get concerned about portability, data lose, crashes, etc. I want to be responsible for my own data and know that I have it whenever and where ever I am.

If I change systems, platforms, etc then MySQL and a web mail interface is pretty portable. I don't have to worry about converting e-mail to a new platform. I also don't like leaving all of eggs in one basket like MobileMe or Yahoo. What if something happens? They are not without failure and mistakes.

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Re:Ask HN: WebMail packages for personal use by kmg on Monday September 27, 2010 @11:25PM (#1734454)

Webmail clients don't do mail storage like desktop mail clients like thunderbird/outlook, i.e., there is no "download messages for offline use" option. Some usually cache message data of mails you accessed, but that's different.

Most webmail clients talk to a backend IMAP server which does the storage. The most popular and open format for mail storage is Maildir. So get a local IMAP server running with Maildir and access the IMAP server with http://roundcube.net/

Considering that you have 8GB of mail, I would suggest you go with http://dovecot.org/ and its mdbox storage instead of Maildir, that way if you don't like dovecot for some reason, you can convert from mdbox to Maildir to migrate.

The last piece of the puzzle is to bring in new mails from your mail account(s) to your local IMAP server. For this probably a tool like http://wiki.github.com/jgoerzen/offlineimap/ can be used.

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Re:Ask HN: WebMail packages for personal use by mike-cardwell on Monday September 27, 2010 @01:28PM (#1732434)

DBMail is the only mail server I know that uses a MySQL backend to store messages:

http://www.dbmail.org/

It does run on OSX. You'd then need to install a webmail client which can talk to DBMail via IMAP. Most of them work this way. My personal favourite is called Roundcube:

http://roundcube.net/

It's written in PHP. Of course, you'd need to install a web server too.

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Re:Ask HN: WebMail packages for personal use by chrismiller on Monday September 27, 2010 @10:26AM (#1731764)

I can't think of any webmail packages that will read the data directly from MySQL. You could use Google Apps for your day to day email use and then use IMAP to grab a copy of the mail and store that in MySQL?

If you don't want to go the Google Apps route take a look at http://roundcube.net/ .

Edit: It looks like Roundcube can use a MySQL db to store mail.

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Re:Ask HN: WebMail packages for personal use by mike-cardwell on Monday September 27, 2010 @01:33PM (#1732463)

Are you sure it can use a MySQL db to do that? I know it stores preferences in a MySQL db, but actual message data...?

You'd also need an MTA that can deliver the mail into the database in the first place...

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Re:Ask HN: WebMail packages for personal use by chrismiller on Monday September 27, 2010 @03:12PM (#1732945)

Yep you're right. Sorry only had a really quick look at the Roundcube page.

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