Hello and a special archive question

[Paulo_M_]

Hello all,

I've been a Synology owner for a number of years but I've registered here just a few minutes ago. Hello everyone.

I joined the forum with some questions up my sleeve already so here goes the first one...

I'm essentially a mail hoarder I know, I could change my habits but bear with me a little. My Mac's Mail programme has literally hundreds of thousands of messages (accumulated over the last many years, on different Macs, and neatly organised into an enormous amount of folders) -- they're logical and make sense to me and I growl any time someone mentions the delete button regarding this particular issue. Clearly, the vast majority (over 95%, I'm sure!) of these messages are not needed at short notice -- but every now and then I do need to search the whole lot in search of a specific topic. All this said, it crossed my mind that I could perhaps make good use of one of my Synology boxes to move all these messages from my Mac. The crucial issue is to have this "NAS-based mail archive" searchable in an easy and reliable way. Does anyone have any ideas on this front?

Many thanks in advance for your feedback.

Paulo

 

[fredbert]

Welcome to the forum.

You can run Mail Server and use only the IMAP feature. You can then create a new mail account in Mac's Mail and copy across messages between whatever is your current email account and the one on Mail Server.

After that you can use any email client that supports IMAP (is there one that doesn't?) to access the archived mail, if you don't want to keep this on the Mac's Mail app. There is also MailStation, which is a webmail interface to Mail Server: it's based on RoundCube v1.3.

 

[Paulo_M_]

Thanks for the feedback. I had read about a similar setup, but I'm a bit confused about practical details. Let me explain better. The vast majority of those hundreds of thousands of messages are no longer associated with a specific email account: they are in folders (under 'On My Mac', in my Mac's Mail program). How do I move them to Synology's Mail Server (on the NAS), maintaining the same folder structure?

 

[fredbert]

Even when in 'On My Mac' they are still handled by Mac's Mail as any other email account, there's just no associated IMAP server.

What I have done in the past is to drag and drop between locations. I think dropping folder works too but I haven't tried for a long time and I'm not organised to do it. Like in Finder you can hold down the 'command' key make the drop a copy action instead of move. That may be safer.

 

[Paulo_M_]

Thanks -- I'll try to follow this road and see where it leads. Many thanks indeed for the suggestion.

 

[EAZ1964]

I do use outlook on mac/pc.
Outlook is capable to export to .pst files and store them on the NAS.
You can leave exported .pst as archive and only connect this .pst if you need to.

If your mail is in imap, you can keep using the default mac mail client, and only use outlook for archiving purposes.

 

[Paulo_M_]

I intend to (need to!) continue to use my Mac's Mail client to handle my day to day email (using my currently configured accounts) -- that should not change. The idea is to move the absurdly large amount of "historical email messages" to the NAS and still have easy access to those messages, including for search purposes.

 

[Paulo_M_]

Quick question: is it possible to install the Synology Mail Server to run "internally", within a intranet, simply with a private (not public) IP address, without a real domain name?

 

[fredbert]

is it possible to install the Synology Mail Server to run "internally", within a internet,

...within a intranet... ?

Not done it. The domain you assign to Mail Server is as much so that it knows when its STMP server receives messages if they are for its domain* (or one of them) or if it has to relay the message.

If you are only using the IMAP server then Mail Server's SMTP feature can be disabled, or at least ignored (though ensure it cannot be access and used as an open relay).

*in which case it will process the message and it ends up in the right user's mail store.

 

[Paulo_M_]

Sorry -- I meant 'intranet', of course... I don't need to send email since the purpose of the exercise is to see if I can use Synology's Mail Server as a simple archive for old email...

 

[fredbert]

I don't think you need to use the STMP server within Mail Server. If I remember correctly the domain is only requested for the SMTP setup, so if you disable SMTP I don't think you will need a domain.

Accessing the IMAP server can be with or without SSL (with will use a certificate, assigned in Control Panel / Security). You can still use the IP address as the server name. One thing with Mac Mail is that, while adding the new account, you can't just do a fully manually setup... you have to wait until it realises it cannot find the server for the email address it asks you to provide. Once it fails you can do a manual setup using full domain name / IP address, port, security option, login name, and password.

 

[Paulo_M_]

@fredbert Many thanks for the detailed feedback -- it is very useful.