I think imapsync will fulfill your needs.

allows my mail clients to connect via IMAP to view and search emails

dovecot will be able to handle this part. This is what I use as a mail archive (once a year, archive all mail from the previous year from various mailboxes to my self-hosted dovecot instance). I wrote this ansible role for it.

downloads new emails via IMAP

As others recommended, imapsync should be able to handle that part.

docker solution

These tools are simple enough to install and manage (one package, one config file), Docker is not needed. If you really need it to fit into your docker-based setup, build and maintain your own images.

This sounds like what I want. Did you make it work or are you still working on your PhD dissertation to qualify for email server setup training like me? 😕

Piggybacking on this question: any solution that provides really good indexing on those local mails, for fast wildcard searching?

https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver should be able to do it.

if i remember this in 6 weeks i’ll check the setup at work.