30.09.2021 updated 01.01.2022 E-Mail When it comes to email hosting, I'm quite old school. Instead of using cloud services like GMail, I like plain IMAP and SMTP. It allows me to take my emails anywhere, without being locked-in. This has served me quite well over the last 15 years.
But lately, one of my providers had quite often network issues, leaving me without access for sometimes hours. As this hoster is a small shop with just a few people running it, I've wondered: What happens if the service goes down, and never up again? What happens to my archive? Hosting my own email server is an absolute no-go, as I don't want to constantly fight against waves of spam or other providers discriminating against unknown IPs. Life is too short to fight too many battles at the same time.
I've been researching this topic for quite a while, and in this post I describe the middle ground I settled on: Run my own backups, and have them in a simple readable format, that allows to search and process them using basic tools.