Email archive

Your email lives at the provider your operator picked during setup (Migadu, Mailbox.org, Infomaniak, OVH, or Mailfence). You keep using it the way you always have — webmail, your phone app, your desktop client. Nothing changes there.

What’s new: each night, your VPS pulls a copy of every message, calendar event, and contact from your provider into the same backup pipeline that protects the rest of your data. If your provider account ever goes wrong — compromised, billing dispute, accidental delete — the history is still in your operator’s keeping.

What this protects against

• Account take-over. Someone steals your password and clears out the mailbox. The archive holds everything that was there at the most recent nightly run.
• Billing dispute / account locked. The provider closes your account before you’ve exported anything. The archive doesn’t go away.
• Accidental delete. Someone empties the trash to free up space. The archive keeps it.

The archive is append-only: once we’ve pulled a message, it stays in the archive even if you delete it at the provider. This is deliberate. Backups are useless if normal use can wipe them.

What this is NOT

• It is not your inbox. You read and reply through the provider the way you always have. The archive is a safety net.
• It is not real-time. The mirror runs once a night. A message that arrives at 11pm and gets deleted at 7am the next morning, before the 3am run, is not in the archive. Don’t rely on the archive as a “trash can”.
• It is not visible in Nextcloud Files today. The archive lives in a part of your VPS that’s not directly browsable yet. If you ever need to retrieve a specific message or calendar entry from the archive, contact your operator and they will pull it out. We’ll add direct browsing in a later release.

How to set it up

One-time, per person on the team:

1. Open Nextcloud and click the top-right menu, then Mail.
2. Click Add account and fill in the connection details your operator gave you during onboarding.
3. Important: use an application password, not your main account password. Your provider has a screen for generating them (your operator will point you at the right page for your specific provider).
4. Once Nextcloud Mail can connect and see your inbox, you’re done. The next nightly run picks the account up.

Multi-factor authentication on the provider account is part of the onboarding checklist; your operator confirms it’s on before flipping this archive on.

Restoring a message

Until in-Files browsing ships, recovery is a one-line conversation with your operator: tell them roughly when the message was sent or received and to whom, and they pull it from the archive.

For full disaster recovery — provider gone, VPS gone, both at the same time — the Disaster recovery page covers the path. The archive comes back as part of that flow because it sits in the same backup as everything else.

Shared mailboxes (info@, billing@, support@)

These work best routed into your team chat or your help-desk app (Rocket.Chat Omnichannel, Zammad, or an n8n flow) rather than archived as raw email. Each conversation then lives in an app whose database your VPS already backs up. Your operator sets this up at onboarding.