Looking for suggestions / alternatives: Webmail hub for 4+ accounts with custom SMTP support (that isn't Gmail)?
Hey everyone, I’m looking for some architecture advice on a new webmail setup. I’m currently migrating away from Fastmail because it’s gotten too expensive for my needs, and I need to find a budget-friendly (or free) browser-based hub to replace it. My setup…
Hey everyone, I’m looking for some architecture advice on a new webmail setup. I’m currently migrating away from Fastmail because it’s gotten too expensive for my needs, and I need to find a budget-friendly (or free) browser-based hub to replace it. My setup is a bit of a jigsaw puzzle. I actively and equally use four different email addresses, and I need a single browser interface where I can seamlessly receive from all of them and send from each of them: - A Custom Domain address - A Gmail address - An Outlook.com address - A Yahoo / AT&T address (leveraging the grandfathered 1TB storage tier) I'll be honest, I was hoping I could get everything into the Yahoo/ATT box due to the storage size, I'd be set. I can get the emails from the other boxes into this one (except of course for the custom domain), but it seems I can't send from those addresses without triggering an auth failure. Here is my major roadblock: I absolutely cannot stand the Gmail interface, so using a free standard Gmail account as my central command center is completely out of the picture, but from what I can tell, this may be my only option at this point? I've been hunting for a webmail client that allows me to plug in an external outbound SMTP server for my custom domain so I don't trigger 550 5.7.9 authentication failures, while also playing nice with the other consumer accounts. Most major platforms have completely stripped this out over the last few years: Yahoo Webmail: Dropped manual outbound SMTP configuration entirely. Outlook.com: Killed the "Connected Accounts" feature for external addresses. Proton Mail: Doesn't support external outbound SMTP routing in their web app. Right now, the only commercial alternative I've found that supports custom outbound SMTP in a free/cheap browser app is Zoho Mail (via their External From Addresses feature), using Cloudflare Email Routing to handle the inbound custom domain side. Before I make the jump to Zoho, does the community have any other suggestions? I have a NAS so could self host, but with email, would prefer not to. What browser-based setups are yall using to manage a heavy mix of consumer accounts and authenticated custom domains without using Gmail? Thanks in advance!
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I do have to ask, how many of those emails are actually relevant or important? I have some corporate clients who've had their emails moved to new platforms since Exchange 2003 and they only have 25-30 Gigs in the largest of cases. Either you're keeping mountains of garbage like newsletters, etc or you're using your email as a file storage system which really isn't how you want to be using it. To answer your actual question doing a quick search here https://selfh.st/apps/?search=webmail brings up four options so I'd take a look at those myself and see if they do what you're wanting.
Thank you. I believe your link gave me a couple of solid options to look at. I have kept my work emails for almost 20 years now so while not all of them are relevant, I still feel the need to keep them. Overall, it's about 700k emails, but with attachments and some large files in those emails, adds up to just under 100GB. If I removed those file attachments, I believe the emails themselves are only about 45GB.
I just installed it and it's awesome
I do too. Some industries require a certain level of retention that may seem excessive to most. How much is MailStore?
The way we use it, as a company archive, without employee access, the base 5 user license is like $279 I think.
I should also add: I have about 100GB of emails I've collected over the years, so needs to be able to accommodate that
I keep all emails forever essentially. But I use an actual email archive solution for that names MailStore. I found it over a decade ago decided we needed to keep all emails forever. Yes I know how dumb that is, but the c-suite gets what it wants. So all emails since 2008. Millions of emails with attachments all quickly searchable. The database files equal about 800gb at this point. But that’s with serious compression and deduplication.
My suggestion: Archive old email keep active email seperate backup (local + off-site copies) The free + reliable method: Since they are old emails (100GB+), I'm assuming you don't need them for daily use and only need them for reference. If that's the case, keeping them in a separate mailbox/archive is a good idea. Install mail-archiver on your NAS (using docker if possible) -https://github.com/s1t5/mail-archiver. Once all the emails are imported into mail-archiver, that is your local searchable emails for reference. Now create a backup of the entire mail-archiver data folder to Google Drive, or wherever you keep backups (onedrive is bad for backup). Important to get this right so stop the docker container first then backup entire thing (mail-archiver software + all emails). If you ever need to restore it on same or different hardware, just install Docker, extract the backup, and start the container again. I'd also keep the emails in .eml format where possible since it's a standard format that isn't tied to one application and can be imported into other software later. Now you only have to worry about choosing a daily driver for your live emails (Gmail, Outlook, Zoho, Yahoo, etc.). Personally, I'd archive emails older than 2–3 years once a year. It keeps your live mailbox small and hopefully within the free storage limits. The cheap + more durable way: Use Amazon S3 or Cloudflare R2 for backups. For around 100GB, it'll typically only cost a few dollars if you don't restore often. Either way, I'd still keep at least two copies of the archive (NAS + cloud backup). Storage is cheap compared to losing years of emails. Hope it helps!
Just saw a new open source project named MailFlow that looks promising for this kind of thing.