These applications, they are dementors

For the past 6 years I’ve been using Thunderbird for my corporate mail account. And, I’ve stuck with Thunderbird through thick and thin even though I’ve occasionally tried out Evolution, KMail and Sylpheed. I think I have to start to think about giving Thunderbird the good old “so long…”

The mailstore has ballooned into a 28GB mess and growing. And this is with regular deletion of mailing list mails and what not. The recent Thunderbird just stutters and splutters when asked to do anything besides downloading, filtering and displaying-when-clicked. I don’t even dare and let it search thoroughly. The last time I asked it to index the store it churned for a mind curdling 15 hours before crashing the application harder than I’d crash while roller-skating.

The problem is that I am staring at now is not what to migrate to. I’m more or less convinced that offlineimap along with a decent MUA would do the job pretty nicely. The problem that I think I need to figure out a graceful way to solve is what to do with this monster of a mailstore. I need this migrated in the exact specific layout of folders and along with that I need to export the filters. The one obvious solution of pushing them up to an IMAP store and then downloading isn’t graceful (I am not blessed with that size of data store).

Any suggestions would be appreciated.