
Ask HN: Any decent email backup viewer around? - ovnz
There is a nice &quot;IMAP Email Backup&quot; thread nearby which misses one point: once the backup is done, how can I look into it?<p>I have a couple of large cloud mailboxes that I backup locally using getmail python script. As I don&#x27;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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>What I want is to provide a list of mu queries - as &quot;filters&#x2F;folders&quot; 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?<p>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?<p>I tried mutt, but it changed every email I viewed, so getmail was not happy about that. I haven&#x27;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 :)<p>I can&#x27;t believe I am the only one who wants to easily look into backed up emails. Ideas?
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aaronpkelly
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

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ovnz
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?

