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Ask HN: IMAP2Git
All mail clients suck. It seems every single one needs a lot of configuration effort to have a decent experience, most of them have really slow search, and several of them have unrecoverably deleted messages seemingly at random. I'm tempted to try managing my email using Git, one file per email. It'll be super fast and reliable, and I won't have to ever worry about losing my emails after they are safely copied to several separate devices. Is this feasible? Specifically:
- Is there any decent software to save all messages from the IMAP server to one file per message on a regular basis? They'd have to at least have some sensible filenames, like date + subject.
- Are there any Linux and Android clients which will read files from such a folder? I don't mind to `adb push` the repository if necessary, but if I have to read them using a text editor that'll be a blocker.
- daviddever23box 5y agoUnsure that per-file message storage via Git is any better than a SQLite-based client; prove me wrong.
- sp332 5y agoSome filesystems handle lots of small files gracefully and some don't. Git and ext4 have come a long way but some programs are going to have a hard time once you get that many files in one folder. I haven't seen any benchmarks for Android filesystems but I wouldn't be surprised if it's terribly slow.
- l0b0 5y agoI don't have millions of emails; I might've received a few thousand legitimate emails since my first account in ~2000, and most of those I wouldn't keep this long.
- roneoo 5y ago> Is there any decent software to save all messages from the IMAP server to one file per message on a regular basis The mail client Claws-mail used to do that, I didn't check since a few years though