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> A wish: an IMAP server backed by Thundebird's local storage and K-9 as client

Isn't Thunderbird using some weird file based system? Wouldn't an SQLite backed client be a better idea in general? What would the advantage of thunderbirds local storage have aside from maturity?

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The old format was basically "concatenate all mail together in one giant file". I believe newer versions support Maildir ("pretend you're an IMAP server"), partly to support antivirus better (i.e. when things get quarantined under you, hope only the bad message gets moved instead of all your mail).

They do have a weird database format ("mork"), but that is for state tracking, address books, etc. and not the actual messages, I believe.

If Thunderbird moves away from file based I will find a new email client. I already have to deal with the monstrosity that is systemd, don't want my email subjugated to a database. Databases are fine for data. I want my email in files so I can easily move away if needed, to another client.

Yeah, we're sticking with thunderbird in large part for their MBOX support and if they ever dropped it we'd move to something else. MBOX makes it dead simple to parse or grep through your messages.

But isn't something like SQLite fts (full text search, not full table scan, arf arf) more efficient than grep?

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