DarkSirrush

So I am currently using PurelyMail for my email server, as it's hard to beat <$0.40/month for unlimited aliases, which I fully intend to replace when I can afford to justify a VPS. It is incredibly slow to use their webmail, and even checking for new emails can take awhile, so I was hoping to mitigate as much of that as possible by having a local copy of my emails and connecting to a self-hosted webmail/connecting my phone app to the local email server instead of the 3rd party one.

This would also act as an interim step to moving my email service to a non-US VPS smoothly, since I would have a copy of all my emails when the time comes.

The problem I am facing with this is being overwhelmed by choice, while not being sure of what I actually need. Every time I search this, I see suggestions of running a stack of 2-10 services, but not really a good explanation of why those services are needed - and some of the explanations seem to contradict each other (I use x services that seems to be feature complete, but I do this function with y service because that's how I set it up 10 years ago), and I am just not sure what I actually need.

I'm also not sure the best way to safely set it up within my current setup. Is it doable with Traefik+Authelia in docker? Should it be it's own dedicated VM? Should I make sure Traefik is watching port 143, or is it safe to forward the port directly to the container/VM?

For services I need to achieve what I want, what is actually necessary/not necessary?

• I see dovecot mentioned a lot, and it seems to have a lot of environment variables that aren't at all listed in it's docker documentation. man dovecot also did not seem very enlightening to me.
• I've also seen imapsync mentioned to be paired with dovecot, what does it do that dovecot doesn't?
• While trying to figure out what I need, I have also seen things like docker-mailserver. This seems to be far more than necessary for my use case though, should I bother looking into it, or keep it simple?
• For mail clients, what is the benefit of Thunderbird over something like Roundcube? Is it worth running a Thunderbird container if I want a webclient, or should I stick to a purpose-built one?