Comment by ellisd
16 hours ago
Anyone using a half-Gmail / half-personal IMAP server to handle the reality that keeping 20+ years or email in Gmail will bump into the storage quota? I'm around 99.5% usage and just slowly deleting ancient emails with large attachments to make it another month.
Dovecot in my homelab seem doable to have an IMAP server to transfer the Gmail based emails to and maintain them indefinitely but would this be a maintenance headache? I've never operated it before and am curious.
I’ve got Dovecot running in a Docker container on my Raspberry Pi. Moved everything over using Thunderbird. If you use mbox format, once done, you can turn the files read-only and Dovecot will still work. And you can throw a Solr server into the mix to get fast mail searches.
I also ran into the Google storage quota after 20+ years of gmail + drive + photos. I ended up paying for Google One at $4/mo just to make it long enough to move all of data somewhere else.