this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2025
9 points (100.0% liked)
Free and Open Source Software
18535 readers
30 users here now
If it's free and open source and it's also software, it can be discussed here. Subcommunity of Technology.
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Local folders are traditionally meant for protocols like POP3, where the standard procedure for email is to get downloaded and deleted from the server. IMAP is designed to keep email on the server, like you'd expect in most cases.
You can copy mail to local folders as a backup, but the problem you encountered is that the protocol was technically right, but you didn't know about the details of migrating email providers. This problem should only happen in two scenarios: when your email vendor seriously fucks up, or when you migrate mail servers without first copying all the email over. As long as you keep backups for the first scenario, and remember to copy over email first during the next migration, you should be in the clear.
You can use your email in whatever method you prefer, of course. I prefer to keep email centralised around my server. If you're going local-first, you could consider using the older POP3 protocol instead, which is more local-oriented.