for that, Immich is pretty much made for it. the phone app can back up automatically and it’s the closest thing to Google/iCloud Photos you can host. it has arm64 images and the docs say 6GB RAM minimum, 8 recommended, so a base M1 is fine for one person. one Asahi gotcha: it uses 16K memory pages, and a few arm containers built with older jemalloc crash with “Unsupported system page size” (some Immich postgres tags did this on the Pi 5). the current default compose file is fine, just don’t copy an old pinned database image from a random guide.

on Thunderbird for Android the push connection and the new mail alerts are separate settings, which catches a lot of people. check Manage folders > Inbox and make sure both Enable Push and Notifications are on, then Settings > your account > Notifications > New mail notifications. if it still only turns up when you open the app, set its battery usage to Unrestricted, and on Android 13+ allow “Alarms & reminders” for it (that’s in the app’s system settings, not under permissions). FairEmail is worth a try too if you get fed up with it.