Email import tool built-in to Cloudron

[d19dotca]

I'd like to request that Cloudron entertain the idea of building a built-in mail importer tool which would be compatible with Office365 (or now known as Microsoft365) / hosted Exchange servers, along with any IMAP and other typical services. Even if Cloudron added more of a self-hosted imapsync solution with a GUI or adding the ability to import MBOX or PST files directly (as opposed to via Roundcube currently for MBOX import) as a Cloudron admin or mail manager, it would be really great to have.

This idea stems from a recent need to import data from a customer's Office365 account (they purchased through GoDaddy), and that was an absolutely awful experience. I've always used the imapsync tool before on my system, but apparently in October 2022 Microsoft deprecated basic-auth protocols for authentication which has basically made the imapsync tool useless for it without a giant list of workarounds and other steps to take which involve creating "apps" in Azure to register and get an app ID, use OAuth2 access tokens, etc. It's a headache now due to the recent changes by Microsoft. This led me to think something that would make Cloudron even more unique (and a nice business proposition for some) is a migration tool. A few third-parties exist which I haven't tried, but it doesn't seem like there's a lot of them and this may be something Cloudron (and users) could benefit from.

Some possible solutions (I cannot vouch for these) for people who come across this needing to import mail into Cloudron:

• https://www.mailjerry.com
• https://www.codetwo.com
• https://www.bittitan.com

I recognize this may be a difficult thing to implement and may not even be worth the time behind it, but wanted to at least present this as a possible feature that would be super useful.

[necrevistonnezr]

@d19dotca Great idea!
(just for future reference: I have always relied on Thunderbird with Import Export Tools NG for import / export tasks - it's not very techy as in no terminal and not automation but it does the job well)

[fbartels]

just to add one more player being active in this field:

• https://www.audriga.com/en/Index

"Modern auth" is nice, since it makes these protocols more secure (through adding e.g. 2fa to imap connections), but indeed it is a bit of a hassle since not all client applications have real support for it (and then there are applications that generally support it, but have hard coded auth providers so you can't use it with your own stack).

Instead of creating your own oauth credentials to get data out of ms365, I would rather recommend to setup app passwords as this simplifies the process greatly. See https://www.limilabs.com/blog/office365-app-passwords for example.

[d19dotca]

@fbartels funny enough I tried the app password route as that seemed like a viable alternative but the app passwords option didn’t exist for some reason. Not sure if it’s because it wasn’t necessarily a full Office365 account due to it being provisioned via GoDaddy but whatever the reason it didn’t exist so I was stuck If people have the ability to set app passwords though then I agree, I think that would work well.

[marcusquinn]

Heard good things about this:

• https://omm.ovh.net/

Obviously not self-hosted, but if you're not encrypting your partitions anyway, then technically your host can see all emails just as easily as with migration tools. I doubt they have any interest in their contents, but then privacy and encryption is another conversation for another thread. Just posting this to help compare features and possibilities.

[d19dotca]

@marcusquinn I had used that before but unfortunately didn’t seem to work for my Office365 migration, which I was surprised to see. Kept throwing me a generic error when I tried. It’s definitely a helpful tool otherwise though!