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  • Can mailcow be used as a "store and view" utility for emails?

Hello,

Here’s what I’d like to achieve:

  • Have a system that let’s me backup my emails from multiple sources (multiple gmail accounts in this example)
  • Have a web UI that let me easily access all these emails, search through, etc

It feels like a very basic use case and I thought something out there would be built for this and easy to setup. But I’ve been struggling to find a good solution for this.

I’ve looked into http://gmvault.org but it seems that it’s only for backup and restore, no web UI to go through all the emails.

Then I discovered mailcow, but:

  • Can I achieve this mailcow?
  • It looks like mailcow is built for way more than this

When I look at the requirements to set it up

docs.mailcow.email
https://docs.mailcow.email/prerequisite/prerequisite-system/
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it says:

  • RAM: Minimum 6 GiB + 1 GiB swap (default config)
  • Disk: 20 GiB (without emails)

Which seems absolutely excessive for my use case.

So my questions are the following:

  • 1) Can mailcow achieve what I want?
  • 2) If so, can I run a subset of mailcow to achieve only what I want?
  • 3) Is there another app that is better suited to handle my use case?

Thanks!

Do you plan to self-host? I run mailcow on a Ubuntu 22.04 virtual machine with 4 vCPUs and 4 GB of RAM and it runs perfectly fine.
I think your use case departs a bit from the intended use of mailcow, but I guess you can use it like that. I believe you’ll need to get a custom domain in order to be able to access the SoGo webmail interface (for SSL/TLS).

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I do plan on self hosting and I do have a domain already so that would be no issue.

Really the issue is how to have backups that I can read my emails from so that I can clear my gmail account from time to time…

The answer to your question is YES, you can most definitely backup your gmail and any other provider’s emails in your mailcow server.

After you have configured your new mailcow email server with your custom domain, then I can think of at least 2 ways you can achieve this:

  1. Simply configure your newemail@yourcustomdomain.com in your same email client where you have your other email accounts on your computer (Thunderbird works great). Then simply select the emails you’d like to move using the email client.

  2. Another option is to use mailcow’s admin UI to create a sync job where you can enter yout gmail credentials in mailcow for it to automatically sync the accounts.

Good to know it could at least work for my use case!

Is there a way to run only a minimal part of mailcow? It’d feel absolutely excessive to have 6 or even 4gb of ram for this service (and I clearly don’t have that as I’ve got many other services running).

I don’t think you can pick and choose.. mailcow is a combined package..

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