I want an email client that can download all of my existing Gmail emails and then i can search for them quickly. I have tried Thunderbird, Mailspring, Clawmail, Geary. Some of them can download all of the emails, but when it comes to time to search, they often freeze. Thus, I would then need to do the old fashion way: open up a browser and login from there.
Is Mutt ok with such requirements? Any other alternatives?
I also use GrapheneOS on my phone. Before I had Fairmail for my Gmail account but the search feature is quite buggy. So… even though i know it is shitty, I have to use the official Gmail app for my Gmail stuff. It gets the jobs done: i can search for an email 3 months ago or follow up on an old email thread very quickly.
emails
Not a noun, my dude.
I use seamonkey, but only for convenience. It grabs all my email and caches it locally for me.
I’m a bit puzzled - I have literally gigabytes of emails downloaded to thunderbird and I don’t get any freezes on searching - there’s 15 years of emails from my personal domain, plus 2008-2012 of active use and then passive amounts since on gmail, PLUS 3 work domains over several years in that set and I’ve never had it freeze.
My machine is adequate but not top end (32GbRam, Ryzen 7 3700X, 2Tb NVME/M2 SSD) - it was “good” 4 years ago when I assembled it, it’s probably bottom tier by now. Running Arch, but also dual boot Mint - both are fine with it.
Just checked -there’s 10.3Gb in the personal domain alone. Have a look at your PC config - unless you have tiny amounts of RAM or are running on a super slow HDD there’s something wrong with this picture
You could try Betterbird.
Your performance issues are likely not an issue with thunderbird but with your hardware or some weird filesystem. Like others in the replies I have ten years of emails stored in my thunderbird inbox and they search near instantly.
It does not matter where the mails come from (gmail or other), if you are using thunderbird or any other client to store them locally, virtually all providers have an imap and pop3 endpoint the client connects to download everything
Do you mean full text message body search or just headers (To/From/Subject etc.)? Claws Mail is very fast when searching in headers, but not in message bodies.
Never had performance issues with searching on Thunderbird. How many bajillion mails are we takling? Have you tried a TUI mail client like aerc?
A four part series on how to download all your emails using Thunderbird https://firewallsdontstopdragons.com/withdraw-your-data-email/
Evolution works with the Linux kernel mailing list that can be several thousand emails a day. Just be sure to add your Gmail accounts via the gnome control panel (if your desktop is on Fedora or similar) rather than via Evolution. Also look at using AI if you have a LLM / agent with access to your inbox. Google offer this via their Gemini Pro subscription - free for a year of you happen to own a Pixel 10 Pro. I’m guessing that as you use GrapheneOS you probably don’t want to give Google access to your phone. Searching via the Gmail web interface should work fine though.
Better advice. Screw AI. But if you’re going to use it for the love of God, don’t give a non-local AI access to your private emails. Holy opsec fail
This but a Docker or Podman pod where you can have it download your emails and allow you to send emails but thru the web so you can see your emails at work or on your phone.
