Hi all,
This question might already have been answered but I couldn’t find it on the forum.
I am using currently 2 laptops - Manjaro Plasma and my former daily driver win10. One of my email accounts is a pop3 one with online storage limitation, so I download mails and keep a history of 3 months or something on the server. Unfortunately, I am using Outlook PST files on my win10 machine to archive this account. On Manjaro Plasma I am leaning towards Thunderbird while also trying BlueMail and KMail.
Now I want my email to be machine independent, so I can reinstall Manjaro or add a third laptop for a while to read the same account and still be able to access all my archived mail from each device. So I need a machine independent mail archive and I want this to not be spyed upon. Also, I’d like to move the existing 4 GB of archived mails to this independent archive. My first guess would be something like an email vault accessible via Dropbox or Nextcloud but there may be other solutions.
Has anyone found a reliable solution to this puzzle?
That format is Windows only… if you want it universal then use mbox or plain eml files.
On Linux you can convert it with readpst (install libpst for that).
On Windows it might be the easiest solution to install thunderbird next to outlook and let it import everything from outlook. Then you can export it as mbox.
A more reliable solution would be running a private mail server, which just import all mails from the accounts. That account on your private server will not be able to send mails, but rather archive them regularly.
You need a email provider supporting IMAP - which everyone does.
IMAP stores everything on the server - which of course brings in the question of privacy.
Only a handful do that.
both providers can import your email from another imap account.
both providers offers storage next to the email account itself.
proton.me has a bridge so you can use e.g. thunderbird as mail client but also outlook is supported - which should make it a breeze to mogrify the content of you pst archives to a proton account.
@megavolt @linux-aarhus Thanks for the suggestions. I’ll have a look at it.
I assume I would need an extra device (maybe NAS) for this private mail server?
Not necessary, but preferable.
no you don’t - I trust proton completely
Also throwing mailfence, tutanota and startmail in the mix.
Not sure yet which suggestion will be my solution. Both are equally valid.