That thing is power hungry. Don’t even plug it in if you’re not even sure you need to use it for anything. It’ll cost you plenty in electricity just to have it idling.

Just telling you what the error is saying.

Looks like you didn’t configure credentials for the DB user.

It wouldn’t work the way you’re imagining, at least not by default. You’re thinking of using IMAP as an archive of sorts, but that’s not how it organized data. The exchanged mails between the IMAP host and the MTA need a unique identifier to organize contents of the DB, and this would not be possible or automatic if your switched the upstream MTA.

Maybe you could run an interchange of sorts that pulls mail and acts as another interim MTA and pushes them to something to achieve what you’re going for. I’d be shocked if you found anything that documents a solution like this because it’s 100x easier to just organize multiple accounts and have local organized archives.

I’m confused about the POP requirement if you’re not already using a specific service. Every mail server has IMAP.

You’re describing a mail client. Why would you need an IMAP server?

If you’re just looking for a source to acquire tracks, Qobuz works. Their mobile client is trash, but the serve quality and source files are great. Easy to migrate Spotify playlists over as well.

Sort of, but not really. It’s a pub/sub ecosystem, so if your services are offline, they aren’t going to be pulling the delta of missed data beyond a threshold. That’s why clients are clients, because they are built to do this for this purpose.

It wouldn’t make sense for a deployment acting as an active instance to act like a client in the way you’re describing, because the services are configured and tuned to NOT act that way, but ingest data available at time of publish to the endpoints they are subscribed to.

You’re talking about syncing and downloading content from external services, which makes me think you’re just imagining these as being a client versus an “instance”. In that case, just use a client because neither of these services inherently do what you’re asking, that’s what a client of these services does.

You’re asking a very general question, and will get a lot of general answers.

Figure out what you want to run first, get it running on what you have available, then adapt if you run into issues.

I wouldn’t be asking just what other people think you should do because you’re going to get a lot of noise.

Anything. You don’t need any services to be public unless you choose for them to be.

The biggest thing I’m seeing here is the creation of a bottleneck for your network services, and potential for catastrophic failure. Here’s where I forsee problems:

1. Running everything from a single HDD(?) is going to throw your entire home and network into disarray if it fails. Consider at least adding a second drive for RAID1 if you can.
2. You’re going to run into I/O issues with the imbalance of the services you’re cramming all together.
3. You don’t mention backups. I’d definitely work that out first. Some of these services can take their own, but what about the bulk data volumes?
4. You don’t mention the specs of the host, but I’d make sure you have swap equal to RAM here if youre not worried about disk space. This will just prevent hard kernel I/O issues or OOMkills if it comes to that.
5. Move network services first, storage second, n2h last.
6. Make sure to enable any hardware offloading for network if available to you.

Just kinda flipped through his guide. It’s a bit dated on knowledge and techniques, even for beginners.

You don’t need a computer for a router. Get a router that ships with OpenWRT and start there. GL.iNet makes good and affordable stuff. Use that for your ad blocking, VPN, and so on to get started.

I’d just skip OpenVPN altogether and get started with Wireguard or Headscale/Tailscale.

If you want to run other heavier services, start out with a low-power minipc until you’re settled on what your needs or limitations are. You can get a very capable AMD minipc for $250-300, or an n100 low-power for a bit cheaper. Check out Minisforum units for this. Reliable, good price, and solid warranty.

If you deal in heavy storage, maybe consider adding a NAS to the mix, but maybe that’s a further steps. OpenWRT is a good starting point just to get your basic network services and remote access up, then just move on from there.

A good and fun starting point for some people is setting up Home Assistant on a minipc or Raspberry Pi (honestly, the costs of Pi boards now is insane. Might be good just to get the minipc).