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My email hosting provider gives me access to a personal, cheap IMAP server with limited mail storage space (100 Mb). I like this, because I do not want (i.e: know how) to administer a mail server. However, I want to be able to store more than just 100 Mo of emails. How should I go about doing this?

  1. Setting up an intermediary IMAP server that would sit client-side between Roundcube and my hosted server?
  2. Configure Roundcube for email archiving after the email has been deleted from the IMAP server? Does this setting even exist?

I have full control (and virtually unlimited storage space) of the machine where Roundcube is installed.

Régis B.
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What I finally did was to set up a dovecot server that retrieves my emails by POP3, stores them in a maildir and serves them to Roundcube by IMAP.

Régis B.
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The easiest way is to just buy more storage space for mail, or maybe forward everything to a free mail provider like Google Mail and use that for reading mail (or point your RoundCube instance to GMail).

Setting up an intermediary IMAP server would be possible, but nontrivial and you would end up with a similar setup to the GMail solution.

I don't really know RoundCube, but since it is only an IMAP frontend AFAIK, I doubt it would offer a local archive functionality.

Sven
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  • The whole point of my approach is precisely to get rid of my Gmail account :) Which intermediary server would you use? – Régis B. Jul 22 '11 at 12:51
  • Take your pick: Dovecot, Courier, Cyrus are the most common I believe, with Dovecot offering most features with a reasonable simple configuration. Years ago UW-IMAP was even simpler to configure but I am not sure if this is still maintained. I use Dovecot on my systems. – Sven Jul 22 '11 at 12:58
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Is POP an available protocol from your email hosting provider? If so, you might consider POP over IMAP as you identified that you may have a lot more storage flexibility with your RoundCube configuration.

POP can be configured to download the emails off of the email hosting provider and RoundCube will still give you web access to the emails.

user48838
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  • My email hosting provider has POP3 access, but Roundcube is IMAP-only. Thus the need for an intermediary server. – Régis B. Jul 23 '11 at 21:35
  • Wow... That is not as common to see a webmail server omit POP3 support - although PO3 is falling out of favor for a lot of folks. If you are not adversed towards Windows, then Mercury 32 has the features needed to POP-from your email hosting provider and turn around to also serve as an IMAP server for Roundcube. – user48838 Jul 23 '11 at 22:11
  • Unfortunately, the webmail client will run on a Linux machine. – Régis B. Jul 25 '11 at 09:36
  • To run Mercury 32 with Roundcude would probably mean running a Linux and Windows system. – user48838 Jul 25 '11 at 13:23