What I am planning to do is to use POP3 to download mail from google to my own VPS. From there access them via a web interface, desktop clients and mobile clients.
While mailpile can obviously fulfill the first need, can it use IMAP to serve those downloaded mail to my mobile and desktop clients? Thank you!
Mailpile does not include an IMAP server. So the short answer is no.
The longer answer is, you could set up your own mail server with an IMAP service, and also run Mailpile there. But that might not work very well, I don’t necessarily recommend it.
Got it got it. So that means once the mail is downloaded from google, the only way to view it would be with mailpile’s own webUI? Is there no way to use other clients? For example thunderbird or apple mail client.
Thank you so much for sparing your time to answer my question.
If you tell Mailpile to download and encrypt, then yes, only Mailpile can decrypt and read.
However, if you tell it to download and not encrypt, the files are stored in a standard Maildir format which other tools can read. This grants access to the raw mail, but won’t reflect the tagging and organizing you do within Mailpile itself.
Some Mailpile users use something like fetchmail or offlineimap to download, and then have Mailpile (and potentially other tools, like Dovecot IMAP) read the mailboxes created by those tools.