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Search is my biggest issue too. I switched out of gmail to my self-hosted server using roundcube and searching through IMAP is excruciatingly slow compared to gmail, even after I moved the mailboxes to an SSD.

I am not sure whether this is a limitation on the IMAP protocol, but I suspect a proper replacement to gmail might involve coding a new mailbox backend and protocol.

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I may be wrong, but I believe IMAP, the protocol, just defines how IMAP clients/servers should issue and respond to search commands, but doesn't deal with mail indexing and things like that.

Cyrus IMAP, which I use, provides Squatter, which substantially speeds up search, but the IMAP client is still the interface. Performance I get is around a sec for a simple query, a few sec for a more complex one against a folder with 20K messages.

Last I checked, Roundcube had very limited search capabilities. Thunderbird is much better, but I'd prefer a terminal based search. Something like SQL. Does anyone know of a tool like that?

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