Is there a self-hosted email client with push notifications?

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I currently use two mail clients: Betterbird (Thunderbird with additional bugfixes) on Linux [PikaOS] & FairEmail on Android. I have numerous folders because of server-side sieve filtering, which mostly creates structures like /<domain>/<localpart>. While it works, FairEmail is a battery drain when fetching all folders (I assume because there is no FetchAll in IMAP) and both are rather slow. Thunderbird especially also kind of sucks at picking up newly created folders.

So now my line of thought was to have a self-hosted email client/web app, which would eliminate these two main issues. Instead of an FairEmail/Betterbird, I would like to use a PWA. I would appreciate it if it had some offline caching, though. A must is push notifications on my android device (ideally through some proxy or UnifiedPush, so I don’t have to expose the client to the WWW). I would run it on a local server & access it via VPN. PGP client support would be neat as well, though I currently do not use it.

To clarify: I am not looking to host a mail server & I am not looking to host a desktop app. I am looking for something like Rainloop, but it needs to download the mails from multiple providers, automatically pick up new folders & send notifications (via browser, ntfy, gotify, etc) when something arrives and obviously the UI needs to work on Desktop and Android.

Does anyone have any recommendations in this regard?

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The point of a mail server is that many clients can connect to it and get what they need. What I'm reading here is that you want to disregard the ability to already do that in favor of having all your mail funneled through a self-hosted 'something' that just sends push notifications to your mobile...but then you'd still have to have your mobile mail client go and download all this mail you said is a battery drain, so you're sort of negating yourself.

Now...the real crux of the problem you're describing is simply that your mobile mail client is not very efficient, so why wouldn't you just solve for that instead? Create a better workflow for your mail so your client doesn't need to IMAP crawl EVERYTHING, or reduce the frequency it syncs maybe.

If that's still not enough, depending on your mail host (which you didn't mention), there are ways to simply subscribe to push notifications from their service more than likely if that's all you want.

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SnappyMail seem to be a fork of Rainloop and both Rainloop and Snappymail appear to allow multiple providers - https://snappymail.eu/
Cypht seems to be a similar solution where you selfhost a webserver that acts as a web client to external email providers - https://www.cypht.org/documentation/
I find nothing about push notifications for either of those solutions though, and I'm not sure about how much the webclients cache.

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Thunderbird on Android should support push, have you tried that?

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but then you’d still have to have your mobile mail client go and download all this mail you said is a battery drain, so you’re sort of negating yourself.

That is precisely my point. I do not want a mobile or desktop client anymore. Just send a client which is running on a system which is always running anyway to send me a notification and I can then decide if I will check it out now or if it can wait.

Proprietary mobile clients often work similarly, they do the "heavy lifting" on the server side, send a notification, but only temporarily load the mails you explicitly view temporarily on the device. And thus, they use less battery and storage of the device. Another benefit for the unified client would be faster sync of mail status (e.g. read/unread) as it is only one client on the IMAP server instead of one on each device. And another benefit would be not having to migrate email clients when replacing devices.

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Thank you, this definitely goes into the right direction and I will check them out!

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Thanks for the suggestions, but no, I have not. I am not looking to replace my mail app, but to remove it from my device entirely.

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Might be easiest to just find a mail host that supports push notifications and keep using the mail client that works for you. I host my own mailcow server and enable notifications for mailboxes I want to get notified for via Pushover.

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So if you don't have any mail client, how do you receive the notification?

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You can run a gui-less service that recieves and displays push notifications. I've programmed something like this before.

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Well, no mail client. Browsers, ntfy, gotify and others can receive notifications too.

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If I understand correctly, you want a PWA webmail that also supports the Push API?

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Haven't tried it yet, but I am going to attempt https://mailcow.email/

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I think mailcow only supports Pushover for notifications, but it may have changed.

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99.9% of users don't have/use "server-side sieve filtering", so every new mail comes to the inbox only and the user might move it to a different folder later on. Because the workflow of most users is like this, you will have a hard time "going against the grain" if that makes sense.
My practical recommendation to you would be to just use a single inbox like everyone else if it's not critical for you to have "server-side sieve filtering".
I know it's hard sometimes to not have something work exactly like you wanted it. It happened to me many times also. Going with the majority is much easier and less time consuming than going the other painful, lone, hard route imo. Anyways, hope you find a good solution

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Is there a self-hosted email client with push notifications?