I currently use two mail clients: Betterbird (Thunderbird with additional bugfixes) on Linux [PikaOS] & FairEmail on Android. I have numerous folders because of server-side sieve filtering, which mostly creates structures like /<domain>/<localpart>. While it works, FairEmail is a battery drain when fetching all folders (I assume because there is no FetchAll in IMAP) and both are rather slow. Thunderbird especially also kind of sucks at picking up newly created folders.
So now my line of thought was to have a self-hosted email client/web app, which would eliminate these two main issues. Instead of an FairEmail/Betterbird, I would like to use a PWA. I would appreciate it if it had some offline caching, though. A must is push notifications on my android device (ideally through some proxy or UnifiedPush, so I don’t have to expose the client to the WWW). I would run it on a local server & access it via VPN. PGP client support would be neat as well, though I currently do not use it.
To clarify: I am not looking to host a mail server & I am not looking to host a desktop app. I am looking for something like Rainloop, but it needs to download the mails from multiple providers, automatically pick up new folders & send notifications (via browser, ntfy, gotify, etc) when something arrives and obviously the UI needs to work on Desktop and Android.
Does anyone have any recommendations in this regard? 🙂
99.9% of users don’t have/use “server-side sieve filtering”, so every new mail comes to the inbox only and the user might move it to a different folder later on. Because the workflow of most users is like this, you will have a hard time “going against the grain” if that makes sense. My practical recommendation to you would be to just use a single inbox like everyone else if it’s not critical for you to have “server-side sieve filtering”. I know it’s hard sometimes to not have something work exactly like you wanted it. It happened to me many times also. Going with the majority is much easier and less time consuming than going the other painful, lone, hard route imo. Anyways, hope you find a good solution :)