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Central host for thunderbird data?

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  • Last reply by Matt

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I work for a small business and am currently revamping our networking a little bit, we currently have a wonky system with our email where we all individually run thunderbird and store emails locally until eventually someone goes to our "server pc" and pulls them off thunderbird locally and backs them up. I have recently built us a TrueNAS server and upgraded us to gigabit LAN, we're getting closer to the 21st century, my brain is telling me there has to be a way we can link up the thunderbird too. The way it currently works is we're all basically a hive mind anyway.

We all are the same email address, referencing the same dataset of client email addresses. The only thing different for each of us is our png we each locally upload to our thunderbird that is attached in our email to clients which could stay that way. What I am trying to do is route all of our thunderbirds local storage/references to the TrueNAS storage for local storage of the email, that way we no longer need to "back it up" as its already being backed up. I would then also like to somehow auto archive previous years/months of inboxes and sent emails that we can reference back to. I also would like to try to figure out how to pull that information off of previously kept data, as the way we currently get that information is only locally kept on the old "server pc" running windows 7 that has local folders that are just dated the years respective and has 245gb worth of emails backed up. I would like to try to get all of that moved to the new server and accessible to all of us across the network. Anyone have any idea if this is achievable? Would appreciate any help!

I work for a small business and am currently revamping our networking a little bit, we currently have a wonky system with our email where we all individually run thunderbird and store emails locally until eventually someone goes to our "server pc" and pulls them off thunderbird locally and backs them up. I have recently built us a TrueNAS server and upgraded us to gigabit LAN, we're getting closer to the 21st century, my brain is telling me there has to be a way we can link up the thunderbird too. The way it currently works is we're all basically a hive mind anyway. We all are the same email address, referencing the same dataset of client email addresses. The only thing different for each of us is our png we each locally upload to our thunderbird that is attached in our email to clients which could stay that way. What I am trying to do is route all of our thunderbirds local storage/references to the TrueNAS storage for local storage of the email, that way we no longer need to "back it up" as its already being backed up. I would then also like to somehow auto archive previous years/months of inboxes and sent emails that we can reference back to. I also would like to try to figure out how to pull that information off of previously kept data, as the way we currently get that information is only locally kept on the old "server pc" running windows 7 that has local folders that are just dated the years respective and has 245gb worth of emails backed up. I would like to try to get all of that moved to the new server and accessible to all of us across the network. Anyone have any idea if this is achievable? Would appreciate any help!

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Just before I say anything. Thunderbird has no concept of sharing or even file locking. The core is so old dating back to the last century in the time of Netscape. So a shared profile is a recipe for disaster made more disastrous by simultaneous use from multiple machines.

I would suggest you spin up an IMAP server and an ldap server on that truenas device and use those as your central repository of customer/contact information and mail. You could disable local copies of mail in account settings to make it lighten the download load on the system. The IMAP instance can take over the load of retrieving new mail from the external location and duly notifying the user via Thunderbird using the IMAP idle command.

That would leave your data store on the server and subject to central control