So I think the way I would want to do this is with something like mailpiler (www.mailpiler.org). It’s been on my long list of things to dive into for a while.
Well it is literally exactly what I was asking for. :) But as you allude to the setup is not trivial and would be a bit of a project. It is useful to know about because it could help find a somewhat simpler alternative. And I will add it to my own list in case I find none.
edit:
Led me to https://github.com/polo2ro/imapbox. Which is a different take on the same problem. I am not sure if I like the email all being converted to html like this. It could be a really nice addition but somehow I feel that keeping more original-formatted emails would be wise too. It does also create for each message “A gziped version of the email in .eml format” alongside the html but I would have to look more into what can be done with that.
Alas, no! Things seemed to be going well: I got >90k messages imported from my Google Takeout mbox file before the import was interrupted (not mailpiler’s fault). At this point, I logged into the “auditor” account and was able to see my emails and search them. But, then I resumed the import. By the end of today, the import was finished (~150k messages total). When I logged in with the auditor account, I got some error “No search results” and nothing I could do about it. This is actually what happened last time I tried mailpiler, too, now that I recall. All seemed fine, but, it seems, the database got corrupted or something along the way… So, now it’s useless. I might try it one more time over the next few days. I’ll keep y’all posted.
This kind of tool needs to be something you can rely on if it’s to be used in the way I am intending. If there is a master copy of the mail (as it sounds like you are working from) it’s not as big a deal as you can always go back to that. But if the application is relied upon to be doing its job, possibly in silence for long stretches, it can’t just combust.
I am not sure I really like the word “database” in this context. I don’t understand them and I can’t fix them. Am feeling that maildir, where each email is simply a text file, should be the primary storage. If there is another tool that can index or interact with the maildir then that’s handy, but the mail itself should stay in a plain, interoperable filetype. (Unless that is how mailpiler works? I might be mis understanding.)
I also see that mailpiler encrypts everything. I do not love that. My hdd is already encrypted. I do not want things further encrypted because it also means I am unlikely to be be able to fix any problems.
I think this application is too complex for me. I need something that I can easily administer. Hopefully set up and leave it to be for a long time and not have too much to relearn if something needs to be fixed. It is perhaps suitable for a more advanced user/admin.
Yes, I’m coming to similar conclusions myself. To be fair, encryption is a configurable option with Mailpiler. But, yes, it is all digested and stored in a mysql database, which is definitely more opaque than plaintext in the filesystem. I might try the mutt + notmuch solution described by @marty_relaxes below. Sounds like it might be a challenge to set up but would work great forever after. I’ll need to figure out how to convert my mbox files to maildir, but Google suggests there are tools for that. Good luck to you, let us know what you ultimately figure out! I’ve been working on this off-and-on for a few months now without figuring our a good solution!
Edit: I guess, if you want fast full-text search, a database will have to enter the equation somewhere, though.
Honestly i could live without fast. If its a text file there is always grep, ripgrep, silver searcher etc. But there is nothing in my deleted email demanding immediate attention. Any situation i forsee would accommodate waiting hours or days. I was kind of hoping to continue interacting with it in a webmail kind if way because piling up too many new things for something i wont be working on regularly is just asking for a mess.
The mutt/notmuch proposal is a solid solution for the right person. To me, learning like 5 new major tools just for one project is a big risk. I played around with this stuff a couple years ago and failed at creating even a simple setup to do regular mail stuff. It is absolutely not clear.
So i might try one if the intermediate solutions mentioned elsewhere. A solution that digests mail be acceptable as an addon extra.
Well, I’ve solved it! I now have a web interface (accessible via VPN, although, in principle, I could expose it to the internet) that allows fast, full-text search of all my old emails. Here is the recipe:
Installed notmuch via my distro’s repository and set it up (notmuch setup & notmuch new). This creates a new folder in your maildir directory containing full-text search info.
Installed netviel via python3 -m pip install netviel and then ran it via python3 -m netviel
That’s it! This let’s you search locally. I actually did a few more steps because I wanted to containerize this thing so I could run it on my NAS. I’d be happy to go into detail about that too, if you’re interested. One hiccup was that, for some reason, netviel binds to 127.0.0.1 instead of 0.0.0.0, and there is no way to change that without compiling the project yourself. But, I found a workaround for my Docker container where you can use socat bound to 0.0.0.0 to redirect requests to netviel, so that requests from other computers appear local to netviel.
Anyway, that makes it all sound more complicated than it is. I am super-pleased to have solved this problem at last!
The year was 2002 & I was fed up with windows for various reasons. Connected to the internet looking for a windows alternative & ended up finding slackware. Installed slackware & got it somewhat working. Happily used it for a short while, before moving on to Fedora Core when it was released…
Had been on pop for a while. But lately gnome shell was using a ton of ram and performance was trash, so I moved to fedora with KDE. Been great so far.
Humble guy, but that list of features that they’re working on is really impressive. Got a wee DragonFly Black USB audio thing that just never worked quite right with PulseAudio - install PipeWire instead, and it just does all its tricks. Great work team, keep it up.
i.e file is created (as non-root), trying to remove the file (once again, as non-root) gives me a “rm: cannot remove ‘dir/file.name’: Permission denied” error message.
OK I see. Can you create a new file with nano and then do an “ls -l” so we can see the permissions it’s given? Also provide the output of the command “umask” as the user you’re working with.
That is not an elevated permission, your user should be able to delete that file, do the same in another directory if it works it might be a permission, or more likely an attribute, problem on the directory itself or something on the path to it.
What are the permissions on the directory? What is command are you running to edit the file? What command are you running to delete it? (Have you got selinux turned on? What filesystem is this directory on?)
Once Windows got rid of the gorgeous Aero theme starting in Windows 8, plus the shitty UI/UX that Windows got again starting in Windows 8, pushed me to Linux.
As long as you do not use root privileges (indicated by sudo or that password promt pkexec) you cannot destroy the system in a way that can’t be fixed by deleting a few files in the users home directory.
Despite being an ECE major, I didn’t really bother doing anything with Linux until two things happened at the same time:
I started having to work in several different build environments that were just easier to set up in Linux
I started running Minecraft servers/doing server modding (starting back in the days of Hey0’s server mod and carrying up through Bukkit).
I wouldn’t call myself an evangelist at all. If you’re doing something that I think will be specifically easier to do in Linux (mostly servers and specific kinds of software development), I’ll point out how… but I find that a lot of people’s advice on “use Linux and X FOSS tool” ends up being akin to giving someone bike shopping advice on which welding torch to use to construct their bicycle frame.
Had an old laptop which ran horribly slow on windows. Put Ubuntu on it without knowing anything about that stuff. Years later, I got interested in computer science and Cybersecurity, made some experiences with Kali Linux. Eventually switched my desktop to Linux mint iirc. My servers tun Debian
That old laptop? I used it for the first months of Cybersecurity lectures, until I bought a new laptop with my first salary. This weekend I put LMDE 6 on it. Debian is home.
I can see you’ve gotten some code review so I will just eagerly watch as this gets worked out and eventually merged.
I never had an issue with the backlight curve or lack thereof however a friend recently demoed a similar impl they put together for hyprland and it is a very nice change.
Looking forward to seeing it in the next Gnome release 🤞
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