So I am currently using PurelyMail for my email server, as it's hard to beat <$0.40/month for unlimited aliases, which I fully intend to replace when I can afford to justify a VPS. It is incredibly slow to use their webmail, and even checking for new emails can take awhile, so I was hoping to mitigate as much of that as possible by having a local copy of my emails and connecting to a self-hosted webmail/connecting my phone app to the local email server instead of the 3rd party one.
This would also act as an interim step to moving my email service to a non-US VPS smoothly, since I would have a copy of all my emails when the time comes.
The problem I am facing with this is being overwhelmed by choice, while not being sure of what I actually need. Every time I search this, I see suggestions of running a stack of 2-10 services, but not really a good explanation of why those services are needed - and some of the explanations seem to contradict each other (I use x services that seems to be feature complete, but I do this function with y service because that's how I set it up 10 years ago), and I am just not sure what I actually need.
I'm also not sure the best way to safely set it up within my current setup. Is it doable with Traefik+Authelia in docker? Should it be it's own dedicated VM? Should I make sure Traefik is watching port 143, or is it safe to forward the port directly to the container/VM?
For services I need to achieve what I want, what is actually necessary/not necessary?
- I see dovecot mentioned a lot, and it seems to have a lot of environment variables that aren't at all listed in it's docker documentation.
man dovecotalso did not seem very enlightening to me. - I've also seen imapsync mentioned to be paired with dovecot, what does it do that dovecot doesn't?
- While trying to figure out what I need, I have also seen things like docker-mailserver. This seems to be far more than necessary for my use case though, should I bother looking into it, or keep it simple?
- For mail clients, what is the benefit of Thunderbird over something like Roundcube? Is it worth running a Thunderbird container if I want a webclient, or should I stick to a purpose-built one?
Posts like this make me glad that I have never liked watching videos to learn about different software, and that I have a tendency to just read up on the features/information the dev has made available and then just try whichever platforms look the most interesting.
This has caused me to immediately drop the shinier looking option because the set up was too much of a pain in the ass to do though.