Quitting Gmail: any way to create a searchable archive of my gmail mbox?

old.reddit.com

20 points·bjoko··7 comments

Claws Mail.

I have all my email since circa 1996 right here in my ~/Mail directory, something like 60+K messages accessible through Claws Mail, which is probably the fastest around both to operate and to do searches with. I've changed my mail accounts several times in the past but kept in subdirectories all the old mail, which got indexed automatically, so I can search both my current mail archives and the 20+ years old expired ones in a breeze. Backing up is just a matter of copying recursively the ~/Mail (mail archive) and ~/.claws-mail (accounts, address book, filters etc.) directories somewhere.

https://www.claws-mail.org/index.php?section=general

https://www.claws-mail.org/win32/

The issue with making email inboxes available for searching becomes even trickier when encryption (PGP/SMIME) is involved. Does anybody have a viable solution online/offline for this scenario?

The only solution I can think of is that your index is stored encrypted, but it has the ability to read and decrypt all your encrypted mail, and store that internally the same as any other email.

Mailstore Home. It's free

Download them and import into thunderbird and use the built search.

From the request:

> 2) Import this into some kind of database that I can easily search whenever I need to [hence not just a local copy on Thunderbird for example

Presumably the OP wants to be able to search when remote from the thunderbird instance.

I just VNC into my machine at home, can even do it from a phone using something like bVNC.

I use Eudora for checking, searching and non cloud archiving, then Gmail as a spam filter and the basic view for sending the odd email.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com