[walterbell]

Can Thunderbird do full-text search, or do you use an external program to index the folders?

[RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u]

Not parent, but yes. TB can do both an index-accelerated search, or a full-scan search.

Alternatively, since everything's downloaded locally as mboxes / maildirs, use grep / ag / ripgrep, etc.

[interfixus]

It can. It's clunky, but it can.

[rcarmo]

I have Thunderbird installed on an ODROID-U2 board solely for searching my email archives via VNC when I'm not at home. It works very well.