The Thunderbird desktop app for Linux has a "Export to Mobile" feature. It generates a QR code that you can scan on your phone to, I guess (I haven't tried it), transfer the login info of your email accounts from desktop to phone. After that, IMAP should take care of syncing the emails from the server to each device.
this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2025
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No iphone app yet, at least its planned, guess ill use gmail on my phone and do it manually for now, thunderbird for my pc and tablet. Odd that none of these apps let you sync all your email logins across platforms. Maybe they want you to get all your mail through just them and this would make competition easier.
The Windows version has it as well
You can also just copy your thunderbird profile directory, if it's the same OS, to a different system and it seems to just work. I did this to copy the whole setup and synced mails from desktop to laptop. I also tried this from Windows -> Linux and it did not like that, so I used the import profile feature and re-entered all the passwords.
I sync my emails using a Dovecot IMAP server on my home server. I fetch emails from all my accounts with fetchmail and sort them into the right folders using Sieve. They get indexed and are searchable (ultra fast!).
225000 emails in 13 GB (ZFS; uncompressed 18 GB).
Ive been looking for something like this. Please elaborate 🙂
Basically what I said. Dovecot can be installed on every Linux or BSD system. You'll need Pideonhole and FTS Flatcurve as extensions.
When you install fetchmail, you can let it connect to all your IMAP or POP3 servers. Each process will deliver your mail instantly to your own Dovecot server.
You'll also need a certificate for Dovecot. This can be solved using Letsencrypt.
You can use any mail client you want. I use Fairemail on Android. On desktop and notebooks it's Thunderbird.
So when you login all your inboxes show up under one account and you don't have to login multiple?
With an IMAP server you have the power to serve your own emails. fetchmail will deliver them constantly to this place. You have all emails in one place and you login just to your own server.
I had dovecot running unencrypted IMAP via Tailscale VPN, but with dovecot version 2.4.0 it did not accept my configuration anymore. can you share an easy example?
I was thinking of switching to mailcow so i do not have to configure dovecot myself...
This post explains it, but it is still too complicated for me to figure out: https://doc.dovecot.org/2.4.0/installation/upgrade/2.3-to-2.4.html
My Dovecot is still 2.3.21. It's the most recent package. But you're right the update doesn't look trivial.
Thunderbird (sort of), you can add all your accounts on the PC version, and then it'll give a QR code to copy those accounts to the mobile app. But there's not a continuous sync happening.
Yeah, I don't necessarily need a continuous sync, it's just annoying to login to many accounts multiple times
Piggybacking on this, is there an app that will easily download your emails from Gmail and MS for backup purposes? Something like a pop3 frontend that will archive with folders and tags.
https://www.mailstore.com/en/products/mailstore-home/
Downloads email from most providers, allows for local (text) searches, and to upload it again to an imap provider.
I use mailstore server every day at work to search through about 200k emails we have in our small two person office and it works great!