On Wed, Apr 20, 2022 at 09:55:02PM +0800, Turritopsis Dohrnii Teo En Ming wrote: >> My advice for anyone who wants to be able to keep and search very large >> monolithic mailstores would be: synchronise (e.g. via >> https://isync.sourceforge.io/ or fetchmail or getmail or rsync or Unison >> or whatever) those mailstores from the server onto your local >> filesystem; use maildir on your local filesystem; and use either Mutt's >> "limiting" functions, or notmuch's index/search functions, for >> searching/browsing. > > Wouldn't it be very tedious and time consuming to sync mailboxes from > the server onto our local filesystems?
Setting it up can be tedious depending on your needs. If your mailserver is self-hosted, giving you direct access to the filesystem, that gives you more options (rsync, Unison, Dovecot dsync, etc). Even if not, it's still possible using isync, fetchmail, or whatever (see URL above). Once the initial sync is performed, though, subsequent syncs should only need to transmit the difference between the local and remote mailstores, and therefore should usually be fast and, optionally, automatic. Sam
