Well I set up my email server thru cloudflare and managed to receive emails directly to my basement server. I could live with this and the various security threats incoming thru my unifi. But one thing is for sure, my wife won’t have any of it. She’s a total backwards thinking give me windows or I’ll jump kind of Gal. So I found that I could run a dockerized Thunderbird instance and I thought … Wow! I can just login to it from my computer or my phone, Surely this is it! I can have emails backed up from Gmail to my server and just access my server! And you know what? It works! I can access my Gmail on my browser! It’s beautiful!.. But then I login through my phone and wow! I can access my Gmail! Thru my phone! Except the interface is the same as my desktop. It’s literally a VNC to the server. I can login to it on my desktop and watch the mouse move as I move my finger on my phone! Great party trick, but…the text is microscopic. So is there another way to get IMAP and SMTP interface to Gmail, archiving all emails on my own server? I literally don’t want any of my emails to live on a Gmail server, but I want to be able to send receive and search emails I previously passed through Gmail but now live on my server.
Gmail offers imap amd smtp access. You have to enable 2FA, and then it will allow you to create account for so called “less secure apps”.
In your place, I’d either continue using gmail directly, or finish the configuration of the self hosted mail server and just use that with any smtp/imap client. I suggest getting a separate domain for testing first, before moving your primary inbox there.