> Search is a very different story, you wouldn't want to have to do a full directory scan for text based search. So some level of indexing would be useful for a client mail service.
While notmuch and mu exist, I myself use the mblaze suite (https://github.com/leahneukirchen/mblaze) and it's more than enough for me. As a totally unscientific benchmark, it takes 300 ms to find 7 mails out of 24k when searching in headers, 4 seconds when searching in the body.
I myself use a different way: I convert the entire (all 24k of them) list of emails to 1-lines with Sender, Subject, Date, Folder and feed it to fzf which gives me preview as well. The search is then instant; on the given fields only, but I never need more than that. This is my full MUA: https://sr.ht/~rakoo/omail/
While notmuch and mu exist, I myself use the mblaze suite (https://github.com/leahneukirchen/mblaze) and it's more than enough for me. As a totally unscientific benchmark, it takes 300 ms to find 7 mails out of 24k when searching in headers, 4 seconds when searching in the body.
I myself use a different way: I convert the entire (all 24k of them) list of emails to 1-lines with Sender, Subject, Date, Folder and feed it to fzf which gives me preview as well. The search is then instant; on the given fields only, but I never need more than that. This is my full MUA: https://sr.ht/~rakoo/omail/