this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2023
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I still have every email I've ever received, going back now more than 20 years. My solution isn't terribly fancy, but it gets the job done.
I have a Synology here at home running a mail server. You don't need a Synology specifically, just a simple mail server with access to a lot of disk space. The server isn't on the Open web or anything and doesn't support SMTP. It's just running IMAP to serve the local mail around the house.
I connect to it from Thunderbird on my various machines. I also use Thunderbird to connect to my actual mail servers to do my day-to-day mail stuff.
Every six months or so, I move old mail messages from my actual mail servers over to the archival one. Generally, I keep the mail on the archival server in folders; one per year, that keeps the loading time to a minimum. For example, come January 1st 2024, I'll be moving mail from January 2023 - June 2023 to the
/2023folder on the archive.Searching is done via Thunderbird just like you search any mail account, and on my desktop machine, I let Thunderbird keep copies of the mail locally for quick searching. On my laptop though, I ask it to not keep copies to save disk space.
@danielquinn @crank That's pretty cool. How much storage does 20 years of personal emails actually take up?
It's actually not as crazy as you might think:
That's going back to ~~2000~~ 1995, both sent & received. The first email I have in there is from a friend of mine offering to send me an MP3 she downloaded.
@danielquinn Is that just for text or also for images & attachments? Either way, yeah, 13G is a tiny amount of space when you consider how much info is in there! I wish I had done something similar.
In most cases, it's everything. I've made mistakes over the years, screwing up a transfer or when migrating between servers, and I expect I probably lost some attachments here and there, but yeah, it's everything.