As it turns out, the problem is that Dovecot—which handles IMAP duties on the server—doesn’t notice when the certificate has been updated on disk; it will cheerfully keep using an in-memory cached copy of whatever certificate was present when the service started until time immemorial. //

I created a new root cron job to restart Dovecot once every Sunday at midnight:

# m h dom mon dow   command
0 0 *   *   Sun   /etc/init.d/dovecot restart

Since Certbot renews any certificate with 30 days or less until expiration, and the Sunday restart will pick up new certificates within 7 days of their deployment, we should be fine with this simple brute-force approach

Switching a mail provider is often combined with one major thought holding one back: What will happen to all my e-mails? I don't want to lose my e-mails!

Sure, if you used POP3 to download the e-mails to your mail client, the e-mails are not stored on the server anymore. This worked fine in the 90s and 00s but since mobile Internet there are usually multiple devices connected to your mailbox: Notebook, Workstation, Smartphone or even a Tablet. In such a scenario, only IMAP (IMAPv4 to be precise) can do the job: All the e-mails remain on the server (in the mailbox) but are synced to the local mail client. Every change in the local mail client is synced back to the server. Hence all the devices see the same status.

For a customer of Infiniroot we recently needed to find a way to migrate all the existing e-mails (more than 28'000) from a long-existing mailbox to a new mailbox located on the dedicated server of this customer. This is where we came across imapsync.

Enjoy the security and benefits of a dedicated mailbox server in a highly available mail infrastructure.

The problems are well known when using free e-mail providers or shared hosting mail servers: My e-mail was sent but was it received on the other side? Why are my e-mails rejected by a blacklist? Are my e-mails secure when hundreds of other users are storing their mails on the same mailserver?

E-Mails are business critical and you should not be asking the questions above. The Private Mailbox Server offers a purely dedicated mailbox server in a highly available and redundant mail infrastructure. Your e-mails are stored securely on a private mailbox server; no other customers are using your mailbox server nor are able to access it. //

Data center location: Switzerland
100GB storage $86/mo, or 150/mo for high avail

OfflineIMAP is a GPLv2 software to dispose your mailbox(es) as a local Maildir(s).

For example, this allows reading the mails while offline without the need for your mail reader (MUA) to support disconnected operations.

OfflineIMAP will synchronize both sides via IMAP.

Imapsync is an IMAP transfer tool. The purpose of imapsync is to migrate IMAP accounts or to backup IMAP accounts. IMAP, IMAP4 in fact (started December 1994), is one of the three current standard protocols used to access mailboxes, the two other being POP3 (started November 1988) and HTTP (started May 1996) with webmails, webmails are often tied to an IMAP server.

The latest imapsync published release 1.977 was written on Monday, 23-Dec-2019 20:18:02 CET

Imapsync is a command-line tool that allows incremental and recursive IMAP transfers from one mailbox to another, both anywhere on the internet or in your local network. Imapsync runs on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X. "Incremental" means you can stop the transfer at any time and restart it later efficiently, without generating duplicates. "Recursive" means the complete folders hierarchy can be copied, all folders, all subfolders etc. "Command-line" means it's not a graphical tool, on Windows you have to run imapsync from a batch file. Anyway there is a visual online service, you can try imapsync online at https://imapsync.lamiral.info/X/