Reducing my email footprint

2025-09-02

Over the last years, part of trying to reduce my overall carbon footprint has been to take care of my email. I won’t go into the details of the carbon footprint of email. Let us simply know that:

• your emails are hosted onto a server, which — similarly to a cloud service — has a carbon footprint,
• if you have a client (like Thunderbird) it is very probably setup with the IMAP protocol, so you have a local synchronized copy of the emails on that server.

The goal is simple: I want to have as little email as possible hosted on a server. I want to retrieve and archive a local copy on my computer. You could export emails from a webmail client, and Thunderbird has an “archive” feature which is close to what I want but they suffer two issues: