For those looking for a platform to transition away from Outlook:
Note: paid service
Interesting project. From what I can see, BlueMind seems to focus heavily on easing migration from Exchange and Microsoft 365 by maintaining Outlook compatibility rather than forcing users to completely change their workflow. That probably makes adoption easier for organizations that want to reduce dependence on Microsoft’s ecosystem without retraining everyone overnight.
3 Likes
Does this have the same focus as for example Nextcloud (bar the files part)? I know they can also offer a full “Outlook” replacement, with email, calendar, talk, etc.
4 Likes
A local install option is gnome evolution and then adding every account manually as an IMAP account. The current layout of gnome evolution reminds me of outlook from the 2000s. That’s my setup and it works well for me as all my email accounts are in the one place. You can setup POP3 accounts as well if you want to store your emails locally as a backup.
4 Likes
As far as I remember, majority of IMAP clients have an option to keep & sync local copy of IMAP folders, have not they?
6 Likes
IMAP is a strategy that, if you are not disciplined, allows the server to make backups of every message passing thru, which is why I hate IMAP with a passion!
Unfortunately, POP3 is being phased out by all ISPs, offering “emulation” of POP3, but not the immediate purge on download. Instead, it goes to a trashcan on the server, and you have to specifically purge that manually, and most people leave the 30-day aging purge to take care of that from the server trashcan.
5 Likes
All of that is very true Eric! I used to setup all of my email accounts as POP3, but like you said, most ISPs/account providers are phasing out that option, so the only way to have that “feature”, which is insane, as email was always POP3, is to host your own mail server on nextcloud or similar service. Fortunately, I haven’t reached that stage when I need to consider something like this.
4 Likes
Since I do have a fixed IP assignment from my ISP, I could conceivably set up my own Desktop mail server and completely bypass my ISP’s email service (Rogers/Yahoo). Using that scenario, my emails should bypass all attempts to “surreptitiously” back-up those private messages.
But I know that once I go down that route, I would have to commit to never revert … and I am not sure I am prepared to do that … yet!
Maybe … when my gray matter translates into more gray hair!
4 Likes
I just have the imap accounts setup in evolution with whatever the defaults are. I have to have a look and see how to do that, but I don’t really need the local sync at the moment, standard imap works well for me. If I want to keep something, I just create a local folder and drag it over to there. But similar to the POP3 purge thing, once you do that, the imap account places that email in the trash folder and after 30 days it gets deleted. Evolution is so underrated, I don’t know why more people don’t use it. It reminds me of outlook from the 2000s but works much better.
3 Likes