I’m low key on the lookout for something like this as well, to gain independence from mail providers, and I’ve had a browser tab for Mail Archiver open for a few months now but never got around to trying it out. Maybe this would solve your problem?

I run this setup, mostly. For backups, I just run a BorgBackup cronjob over the Maildir and the configuration folders.

My mail client is mu4e. Advantages over a web-based mail client: I can safely encrypt my e-mail (web-based GnuPG has too many flaws) and all the e-mails are stored on my hard disk for searching and archiving.

I just did this last week. I originally tried stalwart as that seemed to be a pretty small footprint (1 docker container) and had built-in PGP support. But I couldn’t get the built in acme bot to work with my dns provider, maybe you’ll have better luck.

I then tried mailcow and had e-mail flowing in under an hour. Of note, there are a lot of containers if you go the docker route, some may not be necessary if you just want email. I have so far left the default containers running as I don’t really care about the extra containers, it’s all running on a vm w 5 GB of RAM. I’m not concerned about PGP at this point as the server hard disk is encrypted via LUKs.

I can’t speak to your first 2 questions, dovecot comes with mailcow, but I didn’t have to set any specific settings for it.

I port forward directly to the vm, but it’s on it’s own isolated VLAN. use 993 for imap instead of 143, it requires SSL if using a proper mail server.

I use thunderbird for desktop and fairmail for android. I’ve not used

I hope this helps!

I too looked for a way to move my imap emails out of the cloud, and after looking for years, 2 came along in a matter of months. Mail Archiver and Open Archiver. I’ve been using Open Archiver for about 2 months and like it. I just VPN to home (well, Pangolin), and have it as a proxied web page to search old emails.

I run mbsync/isync to keep a maildir copy of my email (hosted by someone else).

You can run it periodically with cron or systemd timers, it connects to an IMAP server, downloads all emails to a directory (in maildir format) for backup. You can also use this to migrate to another IMAP server.

If the webmail sucks, I wouldn’t run my own. I would consider using Thunderbird. It is a desktop/Android application. It syncs mail to your desktop/phone, so most of the time, it’s working with local storage so it’s much faster than most webmails.