fetchmail to an IMAP proxy with filtering?
Jay Faulkner <[email protected]> Mon, 15 Jun 2026 18:58:49 -0700
| Newsgroups | gmane.linux.gentoo.user |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
I've needed to improve my email situation for a while. Right now, I have my personal mail hosted on Office 365. I just IMAP it off into Thunderbird on my desktop, laptop, and phone. Two major problems with that setup right now: first, I keep getting rate-limited on IMAP from Office 365. Secondly, the filtering provided by the service is very limited and doesn't always work great. So I was thinking, it's got to be possible for me to setup a kind of client-proxy, right? I'm thinking: - Fetch 100% of the messages/content/etc from upstream IMAP to my server - Use [local filtering mechanism of some kind] to filter them into trash or specific folders. I'll note: spam filtering is handled pretty well by Office365, so that's outta scope. This is more about putting mailing lists in their proper folders reliably, and regaining some power over things like github and gerrit e-mail notifications. - Host an IMAP server that I can then point at this filtered, downloaded message content and feed it all to as many devices as I want without fear of rate limiting. A couple of extra requirements I have: - Any sorting done locally (e.g. filtering mailing list posts to a folder) needs to *also* happen on the upstream origin IMAP server. I want it to remain the source of truth and for webmail to still be useful. - Ideally I can handle multiple accounts *with multiple logins* transparently. Imagine right now I have a Thunderbird account pointed to [email protected] at outlook.office365.com -- I want to just be able to change that to personal_email_tld (or similar -- not a shared login account) and have it transition over smoothly. If that's not possible, I still want a solution where 1 login = 1 email account, and not one where top-level folders map to specific accounts. I'm asking on the list because... well, first of all I've never done this, but also, I just have no idea of the 2026 state of the art of these tools. I'm hoping someone can help. I've worked with email a lot generally, but all on the server/hosting side and all 15+ years ago so I know the protocols just maybe not the best tool choices. Any help you can provide is appreciated! Thanks, JayF P.S. I know there will be folks saying "change hosting". I'm not going to do that; as that would be disruptive to other family members on my domain. Either way, if I solve this myself the hosting becomes less of a concern generally.