this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2023
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So I think the way I would want to do this is with something like mailpiler (https://www.mailpiler.org/). It’s been on my long list of things to dive into for a while.
I am currently working on this. Finally got the Docker working and am importing my 15GB mbox as we speak! I'll post back here about how it works out.
Did it work?
Alas, no! Things seemed to be going well: I got >90k messages imported from my Google Takeout mbox file before the import was interrupted (not mailpiler's fault). At this point, I logged into the "auditor" account and was able to see my emails and search them. But, then I resumed the import. By the end of today, the import was finished (~150k messages total). When I logged in with the auditor account, I got some error "No search results" and nothing I could do about it. This is actually what happened last time I tried mailpiler, too, now that I recall. All seemed fine, but, it seems, the database got corrupted or something along the way... So, now it's useless. I might try it one more time over the next few days. I'll keep y'all posted.
Oh no!
This kind of tool needs to be something you can rely on if it's to be used in the way I am intending. If there is a master copy of the mail (as it sounds like you are working from) it's not as big a deal as you can always go back to that. But if the application is relied upon to be doing its job, possibly in silence for long stretches, it can't just combust.
I am not sure I really like the word "database" in this context. I don't understand them and I can't fix them. Am feeling that maildir, where each email is simply a text file, should be the primary storage. If there is another tool that can index or interact with the maildir then that's handy, but the mail itself should stay in a plain, interoperable filetype. (Unless that is how mailpiler works? I might be mis understanding.)
I also see that mailpiler encrypts everything. I do not love that. My hdd is already encrypted. I do not want things further encrypted because it also means I am unlikely to be be able to fix any problems.
I think this application is too complex for me. I need something that I can easily administer. Hopefully set up and leave it to be for a long time and not have too much to relearn if something needs to be fixed. It is perhaps suitable for a more advanced user/admin.
Yes, I'm coming to similar conclusions myself. To be fair, encryption is a configurable option with Mailpiler. But, yes, it is all digested and stored in a mysql database, which is definitely more opaque than plaintext in the filesystem. I might try the mutt + notmuch solution described by @marty_relaxes@discuss.technics.de below. Sounds like it might be a challenge to set up but would work great forever after. I'll need to figure out how to convert my mbox files to maildir, but Google suggests there are tools for that. Good luck to you, let us know what you ultimately figure out! I've been working on this off-and-on for a few months now without figuring our a good solution!
Edit: I guess, if you want fast full-text search, a database will have to enter the equation somewhere, though.
Honestly i could live without fast. If its a text file there is always grep, ripgrep, silver searcher etc. But there is nothing in my deleted email demanding immediate attention. Any situation i forsee would accommodate waiting hours or days. I was kind of hoping to continue interacting with it in a webmail kind if way because piling up too many new things for something i wont be working on regularly is just asking for a mess.
The mutt/notmuch proposal is a solid solution for the right person. To me, learning like 5 new major tools just for one project is a big risk. I played around with this stuff a couple years ago and failed at creating even a simple setup to do regular mail stuff. It is absolutely not clear.
So i might try one if the intermediate solutions mentioned elsewhere. A solution that digests mail be acceptable as an addon extra.
Well, I've solved it! I now have a web interface (accessible via VPN, although, in principle, I could expose it to the internet) that allows fast, full-text search of all my old emails. Here is the recipe:
notmuch setup¬much new). This creates a new folder in your maildir directory containing full-text search info.python3 -m pip install netvieland then ran it viapython3 -m netvielThat's it! This let's you search locally. I actually did a few more steps because I wanted to containerize this thing so I could run it on my NAS. I'd be happy to go into detail about that too, if you're interested. One hiccup was that, for some reason, netviel binds to 127.0.0.1 instead of 0.0.0.0, and there is no way to change that without compiling the project yourself. But, I found a workaround for my Docker container where you can use socat bound to 0.0.0.0 to redirect requests to netviel, so that requests from other computers appear local to netviel.
Anyway, that makes it all sound more complicated than it is. I am super-pleased to have solved this problem at last!