Import email, calendar and contacts

🎯 The objective

The aim of this project is to support making Thundermail the primary inbox by making it easy to transfer content from other services.

🏆Intended outcome

Once the import is completed, the user should feel that all their email is on the new server and no information has been lost. We assume the import is deterministic and resilient to errors, so that either there is actionable failure or we can guarantee the import was successful without data loss.

🎒 Resources

• https://ideas.tb.pro/p/import-email-calendar-and-contacts-feature

🦮 Rules of the Road

🟢 In Scope

• Give the user an option to transfer their email content as part of the first time user experience.

• Provide the user with a way to trigger import after the fact

• Map out the flow of how email is synchronized, including the fact that further email may arrive during the sync.

• Transfer email content, calendar data, contacts in the background

• Inform the user about progress or errors in an informative and actionable way

• Support different sources of email data, based on what the Stalwart Vandelay importer supports

• Extensive testing with different providers, based on most common email providers users are coming from (frequency of unique domains from recovery email)

• Complete information to the user on what steps they need to take on their end. This includes support articles for any forwarding mechanisms they could set up with other providers, in case they are moving from e.g. gmail.com to thundermail.com

• Infrastructure setup to run the importer at scale

🔴 Out of Scope

• A flow to immediately set up custom domains, along with the DNS migration required for it. It can be kept in mind, but the actual work can occur in a second project.
• Continuously importing/synchronizing email over a prolonged period of time

🚧 Technical and/or Business Requirements

• We will likely be writing a frontend for https://github.com/stalwartlabs/vandelay , which will in part dictate what types of imports we support.

⛔Risks

💸Cost Analysis

• TODO needs infrastructure analysis on how much data is transferred and what kind of impact the initial data transfer has on the subscription price. If necessary we may only offer this to annual customers.

➿Alternatives

❓Open Questions