

Ask HN: WebMail packages for personal use - jason_slack

I want to start storing my e-mal in a MySQL backend and I am looking for a webmail package that I can run on OS X that will accomplish this.<p>I know that Zimbra is very RAM intensive. I am sure that asking for something like GMail is out of the question as well.<p>Thoughts?<p>Updated: More Reasoning: I have about 8gb of e-mail (compressed) over the course of the last 10 years. Sure some of it could be cleaned out to reduce the over all size. But I get concerned about portability, data lose, crashes, etc. I want to be responsible for my own data and know that I have it whenever and where ever I am.<p>If I change systems, platforms, etc then MySQL and a web mail interface is pretty portable. I don't have to worry about converting e-mail to a new platform. I also don't like leaving all of eggs in one basket like MobileMe or Yahoo. What if something happens? They are not without failure and mistakes.
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kmg
Webmail clients don't do mail storage like desktop mail clients like
thunderbird/outlook, i.e., there is no "download messages for offline use"
option. Some usually cache message data of mails you accessed, but that's
different.

Most webmail clients talk to a backend IMAP server which does the storage. The
most popular and open format for mail storage is Maildir. So get a local IMAP
server running with Maildir and access the IMAP server with
<http://roundcube.net/>

Considering that you have 8GB of mail, I would suggest you go with
<http://dovecot.org/> and its mdbox storage instead of Maildir, that way if
you don't like dovecot for some reason, you can convert from mdbox to Maildir
to migrate.

The last piece of the puzzle is to bring in new mails from your mail
account(s) to your local IMAP server. For this probably a tool like
<http://wiki.github.com/jgoerzen/offlineimap/> can be used.

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mike-cardwell
DBMail is the only mail server I know that uses a MySQL backend to store
messages:

<http://www.dbmail.org/>

It does run on OSX. You'd then need to install a webmail client which can talk
to DBMail via IMAP. Most of them work this way. My personal favourite is
called Roundcube:

<http://roundcube.net/>

It's written in PHP. Of course, you'd need to install a web server too.

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chrismiller
I can't think of any webmail packages that will read the data directly from
MySQL. You could use Google Apps for your day to day email use and then use
IMAP to grab a copy of the mail and store that in MySQL?

If you don't want to go the Google Apps route take a look at
<http://roundcube.net/> .

Edit: It looks like Roundcube can use a MySQL db to store mail.

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mike-cardwell
Are you sure it can use a MySQL db to do that? I know it stores preferences in
a MySQL db, but actual message data...?

You'd also need an MTA that can deliver the mail into the database in the
first place...

~~~
chrismiller
Yep you're right. Sorry only had a really quick look at the Roundcube page.

