Mail-in-a-Box VS ImapSync

may i recommend https://mailinabox.email ?

I don't see why we are a long way away. At the sandstorm end, we need to get to the point, where all updates (of both sandstorm and the apps) on the user machine are automatic. Much like they are automatic on various OSes (mobile OSes in particular but also MacOS/Windows). This is not impossible if a single OS like Debian-testing is targeted.

Mailinabox [1] almost does it. They target Ubuntu stable, and upgrades are mostly silent. But they needed user intervention when Ubuntu had to be upgraded from 18.10 to 22.04, which was quite challenging.

If sandstorm can get there, then putting it into a RPi box is simple. What's difficult is helping the general public understand the importance of protecting their data, so such a product has a reasonable market.

[1] https://mailinabox.email/

If you have a better solution, for example a good provider who offer agency packages which allows many domains and there is no catch, for example very small disk space, then hit me right away. Otherwise, please share your experience with hosting your own mail service. I found https://mailinabox.email/ and https://www.iredmail.org/ for example, but never had any experience with neither of them.

mailinabox.email works great on a basic vps.

You see this https://imapsync.lamiral.info/ ? It's only for mails but it's a great solution.

I've had to do large email migrations before and honestly, imapsync is the way to go - https://github.com/imapsync/imapsync

Do your parents have a domain, or are they just using the provider's domain? I've set up my 1522+ to backup our mail accounts using MailPlus on the Synology, and IMAPSYC running on my lab server. But it's backup only, not archiving. That technology could be used to get to your desired state, but there's some work involved to make a secure connection from the internet to your Synology possible, sync/archive the mail, configure you parent's devices to find your device, etc.

Check out imapsync (https://imapsync.lamiral.info/) - I am using it since years and migrated tousands of mailboxes without any problems.

Check https://github.com/imapsync/imapsync

I would use https://imapsync.lamiral.info/ for email and sure there is another tool for contacts and calenders.

There are two solutions for this 1. Using a tool called imap-sync to sync all your emails (it has a great incremental sync). You can run it periodically via cron 2. Using the same or similar tool and export to a database.

If you want to sync from one IMAP server directly to another, there's also the very popular imapsync: https://github.com/imapsync/imapsync

Have a look at imapsync. Source: former web hosting sysadmin. Used this many times to move email.