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.

---

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

[hudebnik]

Your Mac is, of course, a Unix machine, so it has standard Unix command-line programs like Mail, which reads and writes mbox format. And probably many MacOS-based mail readers are capable of reading mbox format, but it may not be obvious how to find that feature in the menu tree.

One of the things you're getting from Gmail (other than creative assessments of address validity :-) is really good spam-filtering.

[cellio]

Really good spam filtering most of the time (sometimes I find it over-aggressive), and also really good search -- the reason I started using it in the first place.

For years and years I used pine (and then alpine) on Unix boxes via SSH. Then more and more mail that people were sending started to depend on embedded images and formatted display (a trend I still hate but that battle is lost), so my trusty text-only approach doesn't work any more. But Gmail was meeting my needs so I didn't look around for local options. Now I need to do some research to catch up. Even if I keep using Gmail as primary (and it does have a lot of attractions, though also frustrations), there's no point in me having a local backup if I can't read it. And the time to figure that out is not when something has gone horribly wrong at Gmail and I need to find that message from 2012 or something.

[rhialto]

I started using mutt when pine was getting too slow on my mbox size. It has been a long time ago but I think it has been said that if you used pine, getting used to mutt isn't too difficult.

Mutt probably doesn't have too much trouble with a 10 GB mbox file (but my normal inbox is just a bit below half a GB). But I would probably split it in parts corresponding to calendar years anyway.

To make mail accessible to multiple devices, I installed an imap server (dovecot). If you point the local mail reader also to the imap server, it doesn't have to handle the full mbox size by itself but can probably just cache some header lines from older mails that aren't actively read.