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Comment by interfixus | Hacker News Reader

Thirteen years of thunderbirding - downloading all imap for local keeping, and with numerous migrations between servers - has not lost me a single email. In fact, I have all mail correspondance since the mid nineties - around a hundred thousand mails - neatly archived in Thunderbird folders.

For what it's worth.

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If you have >100K emails, how do you know that nothing is missing?

It always says 100% complete when it runs /s

I have kept count.

Me too. There is one caveat, though: I've found TB's UI starts to struggle when dealing with folders with a large number of messages, particularly on Linux. It's not uncommon for the UI to freeze up entirely when I switch the view from one folder to another; usually this just means having to wait a second or two for TB to become responsive again, so it's not the end of the world, but it is annoying.

Yes, feet are dragging from around 10.000 items in a folder. A mild annoyance at worst.

Can Thunderbird do full-text search, or do you use an external program to index the folders?

It can. It's clunky, but it can.

I have Thunderbird installed on an ODROID-U2 board solely for searching my email archives via VNC when I'm not at home. It works very well.

Not parent, but yes. TB can do both an index-accelerated search, or a full-scan search.

Alternatively, since everything's downloaded locally as mboxes / maildirs, use grep / ag / ripgrep, etc.

Same here, only with many many clients, including Thunderbird. Oh, and POP

Oh, and POP, yes, in them olden days of yore.

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