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Ask HN: Any decent email backup viewer around?
3 points by ovnz 2211 days ago
There is a nice "IMAP Email Backup" thread nearby which misses one point: once the backup is done, how can I look into it?

I have a couple of large cloud mailboxes that I backup locally using getmail python script. As I don't want to keep everything online for life, the plan is to eventually delete the old emails from the cloud, leaving only the offline copy.

So what I need is the software that lets me comfortably read these offline emails like I do now. No edits, no replies, just plain read-only maildir viewer with fast search. Another complication is that the backup is on the NAS and I would prefer to access it by SSH instead of shared folder.

The next big thing is search. Without indexing it takes way too long to look through 200K emails, so I currently run mu indexer (a part of mu4e) that indexes the database after getmail, so I can do fast search queries using command line.

What I want is to provide a list of mu queries - as "filters/folders" to the application that does those queries for me and displays the list of emails and preview, like a standard email client. Anything like that around?

Or maybe there is a way to setup an IMAP server that uses the maildir and the index to serve emails into my email client with fast search?

I tried mutt, but it changed every email I viewed, so getmail was not happy about that. I haven't tried Thunderbird yet, but I think it will mess the maildir, as well. I am sure Emacs can do that, but I am not (yet) ready :)

I can't believe I am the only one who wants to easily look into backed up emails. Ideas?

1 comments

I convert emails to JSON, and then import them into Meilisearch, which handles the indexing. Search is instantaneous (CLI/browser). Run the app locally using docker, or deploy it on a cloud service like DigitalOcean (Meilisearch droplet). I don't know if the solution appeals to you, but for me it's very useful
It might work, could you explain how you convert emails to JSON? There could be quotations, attachments etc - is there a script for that? Maybe a manual somewhere?