not the customer but the product

[cellio]

There's apparently another widespread Gmail outage, but this one is more harmful -- it's lying to senders about addresses being invalid (permanent error).

This might be the swift kick in the rear that I needed to figure out a different approach to email. I have a domain, so I should set up a single "collector" address there to receive everything I'm currently forwarding to Gmail (which I'll have to hunt around for; Pobox is easy but not the only one). I hadn't done that before because I thought that relying on Google (a huge, hardened service) was a safer bet than relying on my domain -- what happens if my domain gets hijacked, my hosting company compromised, etc? Rethinking that now...

Fortunately, I'm already forwarding Pobox to an address on my domain, a backup for Gmail, so I probably haven't lost anything. But I might be getting silently dropped from mailing lists I cared about. We'll see.

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Ok, I think I now have everything going to one mailbox on my domain and, from there, mirrored to Gmail for now. I'd like to have all my mail in one place, but the last download of my Gmail mailbox was a 10G file in mbox format, which I don't know how to read or plug in to something else. (I mean, obviously that's a standard format, but what can I use on my Mac to read it?) I don't really want to store all that on my domain server long-term (it'd raise my storage costs), but there's probably a lot of junk in it, mixed in with the stuff I care about. I'd already done some passes to, for example, nuke years-old mailing-list threads that I don't care about now, because Google has storage limits, but that's time-consuming.

I welcome input from people who've wrangled large mailboxes, domains, and email more generally.

Comments

[hlinspjalda]

I'm in the mostly final phases of moving over about 25 years' worth of my Eudora-popped mail to Thunderbird, which is the closest thing to Eudora that currently exists for our home system. I'm talking literally half a million messages. When that's securely findable I'm going to point all my mail to our domain and then snortch it all with Thunderbird. It doesn't feel secure to me if it lives on someone else's machinery.

[cellio]

I have many years' worth of saved email in pine format, which I haven't tried to load into anything but they're text files so I can search them. And I have this mbox file from Gmail. And I have the "live" email in Gmail and (more recently) on my domain. Email management turned out to be hard, or at least messy.

I want email to be available to me from multiple devices -- specifically, my desktop computer and my phone and occasionally my tablet. (The tablet use case is mainly to get a Zoom link for a call I'm doing on my tablet.) That means it needs to be on a server somewhere, but it doesn't mean the only copy needs to be on someone else's machinery. That's the part I need to figure out. (Plus, whose machinery will I treat as primary -- my domain, or Google?)

ETA: Plus, for that primary access, there's the matter of the client software. My domain offers Roundcube and Horde for webmail; neither is as nice as Gmail by a longshot. My phone's "Email" app seems ok but not great; haven't looked for others yet.