Help with creating an Email client

[cargosales]

I need some help please, and fast. I'm way out of my depth and I'm sorry I don't even know the correct terminology to use but essentially ..

I own my own domain name and run my email system through my provider, so all my past emails are only available online (and not on my PC - stupid maybe but there was a very good personal reason at the time for setting it up like that.) I have now had a major falling out with them because they keep whacking up the price to the point where it's become stupid, hence our falling out big-time.

If I've understood them correctly, I think that what I need to do is create an Email Client (or an archive?) on a different system / package ?? so I can download all of those emails that other system - ideally another one 'in the cloud' that I can log into from anywhere, just without being charged through the nose for the priviledge. There is no website attached to the email account so no 'hosting package' required, barring a small and reasonable fee they want so I can keep that email address active with them. Just with the caveat that they will delete all of my old emails when and if that happens.

If anyone knows or understands what I'm talking about then I would be very grateful for any advice or suggestions you may have,

Thanks in advance

CS

[Jhieminga]

An e-mail client is essentially a program that you install locally on your computer. It can either synchronise with an online e-mail storage or download e-mails for local storage. In your case I would install something like Thunderbird (freely available: https://www.thunderbird.net/en-GB/) and setup your existing account as a POP3 connection so that all the e-mails from your 'old' provider will be downloaded to your computer and will be stored locally.

That's not quite what you want, as you will not be able to access them online from then on (or you will only see the new ones there), but I think that's what your provider is asking you to do, as the online storage used will be a lot less from then on. I'm sure someone else will be along shortly with other suggestions. Migrating them all to a new online storage is not something I can help you with, but perhaps there are solutions that will do that.

[netstruggler]

You need an IMAP email server, that you run locally. You would download all your existing emails to it (one or more large text files), and then use any email client to connect to it and view the email archive.

It's not a trivial exercise to set it up though.

[Unixman]

If I understand you correctly then you would need to look at a program such as Postfix which should do what you want.