I do that kind of large volume email shifting in Evolution. So far, it has been able to digest pretty large email volumes - xGBs for sure.
Things get easier after splitting it to smaller mail folders - say by year and message type or month. I am accessing all that email pile by Evolution again on local NFS path. Now that I am describing it - most of my email pile access is by Recoll search these days. I have maybe 60+GB Xapian DB indexing all that and more. I recently moved it to SSD filer volume - I was sick of listening to 2-3 hours long indexing or backup crawls on the disk array. If I'd want to use email client from A or G company, I'd definitely stand up IMAP server and push it there from Evolution; then point those clients at my IMAP server. I have managed to push some 30+GB to now deceased Helm IMAP email appliance. The guys running Helm were the most ethical cloud entrepreneurs I have ever came across. I hope that they are doing well. I had pretty bad experience with all sorts of conversion tools. Hope that helps, -T On Tue, Aug 5, 2025, 21:02 Russell Senior <russ...@personaltelco.net> wrote: > My first thought is to dump it all into a Maildir-backed IMAP server, > in which case you can bifurcate your problem into separate repository > vs client problems. Apple Mail will happily talk to an IMAP server, as > will most mail clients. > > How new mail lands is another consideration. > > I'll admit I have not thought a lot about this, so maybe there is > another obviously better solution. I have a postfix/dovecot set up, > but I read the mail from that using Emacs/Gnus and it has its own > Maildir, so mail doesn't sit very long in dovecot. > > -- > Russell Senior > russ...@personaltelco.net > > On Tue, Aug 5, 2025 at 2:49 PM Paul Heinlein <heinl...@madboa.com> wrote: > > > > On Tue, 5 Aug 2025, James Tobin wrote: > > > > > Hi, > > > > > > I have a large MBOX (14gb). Trying to import into Apple mail. This > > > is hopeless. I tried Thunderbird which seems to maybe work but does > > > not give me a sent folder. Any ideas? I have not yet tried splitting > > > the mbox into smaller files. > > > > 14G? (Cue Foreigner): He's a mbox hero... > > > > I long, long ago moved my messages to maildir (one message per file) > > format, but I suspect my existing mbox file was no more than several > > dozen MB at that point. > > > > There are scripts for mbox-to-maildir conversion, but I don't know > > that Apple mail would have any better luck with maildir. > > > > -- > > Paul Heinlein > > heinl...@madboa.com > > 45°22'48" N, 122°35'36" W >
