I currently use two mail clients: Betterbird (Thunderbird with additional bugfixes) on Linux [PikaOS] & FairEmail on Android. I have numerous folders because of server-side sieve filtering, which mostly creates structures like /<domain>/<localpart>. While it works, FairEmail is a battery drain when fetching all folders (I assume because there is no FetchAll in IMAP) and both are rather slow. Thunderbird especially also kind of sucks at picking up newly created folders.
So now my line of thought was to have a self-hosted email client/web app, which would eliminate these two main issues. Instead of an FairEmail/Betterbird, I would like to use a PWA. I would appreciate it if it had some offline caching, though. A must is push notifications on my android device (ideally through some proxy or UnifiedPush, so I don’t have to expose the client to the WWW). Another needed feature is the ability to send from any email associated to my domain. I would run it on a local server & access it via VPN. PGP client support would be neat as well, though I currently do not use it.
To clarify: I am not looking to host a mail server & I am not looking to host a desktop app. I am looking for something like Rainloop, but it needs to download the mails from multiple providers, automatically pick up new folders & send notifications (via browser, ntfy, gotify, etc) when something arrives and obviously the UI needs to work on Desktop and Android.
Does anyone have any recommendations in this regard? 🙂
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SnappyMail seem to be a fork of Rainloop and both Rainloop and Snappymail appear to allow multiple providers - https://snappymail.eu/
Cypht seems to be a similar solution where you selfhost a webserver that acts as a web client to external email providers - https://www.cypht.org/documentation/
I find nothing about push notifications for either of those solutions though, and I’m not sure about how much the webclients cache.Thank you, this definitely goes into the right direction and I will check them out!
Thunderbird on Android should support push, have you tried that?
Thanks for the suggestions, but no, I have not. I am not looking to replace my mail app, but to remove it from my phone/desktop entirely and instead running something similiar on a server, so I can access it from my phone/desktop when needed.
So if you don’t have any client, how do you receive the notification?
You can run a gui-less service that recieves and displays push notifications. I’ve programmed something like this before. I know it is technically a kind of client, but it is not an email-client.
Well, no mail client. Browsers, ntfy, gotify and others can receive notifications too.
If I understand correctly, you want a two component setup. A PWA client for you to read the mail, and a server acts as IMAP client, fetches mails from all you mailboxes. The server will expose an API for tge PWA to access mail content. When new mail arrives, the server push a beacon via the Push API. The PWA would fetch the sender and title, and display a notification. If you clicks it, only then the PWA will fetch the body.
After a quick glance of the demo, I think SnappyMail fit the bill? It seems can be installed as PWA, and my browser does ask me if I want to give it push notification permission. However, I’m not too sure if the fetch logic happens as I laid out.
99.9% of users don’t have/use “server-side sieve filtering”, so every new mail comes to the inbox only and the user might move it to a different folder later on. Because the workflow of most users is like this, you will have a hard time “going against the grain” if that makes sense. My practical recommendation to you would be to just use a single inbox like everyone else if it’s not critical for you to have “server-side sieve filtering”. I know it’s hard sometimes to not have something work exactly like you wanted it. It happened to me many times also. Going with the majority is much easier and less time consuming than going the other painful, lone, hard route imo. Anyways, hope you find a good solution :)
Haven’t tried it yet, but I am going to attempt https://mailcow.email/
I think mailcow only supports Pushover for notifications, but it may have changed.
Might be easiest to just find a mail host that supports push notifications and keep using the mail client that works for you. Unfortunately, I don’t see how you’re getting a webmail client with multiple mailboxes without hosting that yourself with something like Snappymail. Maybe someone offers a paid and hosted Snappymail.
I host my own mailcow server and enable notifications for mailboxes I want to get notified for via Pushover. I have Snappymail in the stack, but rarely use it because I like K9 on mobile better.
