Anyone self-hosting webmail?

[Telos]

I've been pondering where next to go with my self-hosting journey, and "webmail" popped up on my radar. Historically, I've bound myself to Mozilla Thunderbird, but working from multiple PCs and locations, webmail has some attractiveness.

So I'm wondering... how many here use webmail as their primary email interface? What program is preferred? I've looked (ever so briefly) at Roundcube, Rainloop, Snappymail, Mailpile and Cypht.

To keep things simple, I'll either do this via docker, or if native, from my RPi.

I'd love to hear your feedback. Is this worth doing? Or should I stick w/Thunderbird.

 

[fredbert]

Your prompting has got me to update my test TC to 1.6.0 and PHP 8.0. All seems to be working though I do have it on an access profile that is limited to LAN clients. Also updated the CardDAV plugin too. Have not investigated any web-based CalDAV client alternatives, yet.

Next will be to look into moving from SQLite DB.

 

[ed.j]

Proton user here for years, 0 issues.

Same - apart from the odd outage...

 

[Telos]

Same - apart from the odd outage...

Why not self-host webmail?

 

[ed.j]

Why not self-host webmail?

Because my internet connection at home is much less reliable than the Proton servers!

 

[fredbert]

Because my internet connection at home is much less reliable than the Proton servers!

You can do both, have webmail by provider and at home since it's only a mail client, but I guess there's a question about if there's any benefit to changing what's known and the work to do it. It may be useful as a repository if the Internet is down.

 

[ed.j]

You can do both, have webmail by provider and at home since it's only a mail client, but I guess there's a question about if there's any benefit to changing what's known and the work to do it. It may be useful as a repository if the Internet is down.

Not really sure what you mean - like having Outlook or something save the emails locally?

 

[fredbert]

Not really sure what you mean - like having Outlook or something save the emails locally?

The webmail 'clients' rely on databases to hold local copies of mail on a server of the mail that they have cached from the IMAP server. If you run webmail on the NAS then the database will most likely be on the NAS too. But you could just use a PC/Mac mail client to do the same, collecting mail from Proton mail. There's no right or wrong way to manage your own email, it's whatever works for you.

 

[Telos]

Just an update ... but after 6 weeks, Rainloop has become my primary email interface, leaving Thunderbird solely for archiving and the less usual delayed send and redirect send needs. Only a small issue with Gmail's "not spam" feature, but otherwise all is good.