TE
TechEcho
Home24h TopNewestBestAskShowJobs
GitHubTwitter
Home

TechEcho

A tech news platform built with Next.js, providing global tech news and discussions.

GitHubTwitter

Home

HomeNewestBestAskShowJobs

Resources

HackerNews APIOriginal HackerNewsNext.js

© 2025 TechEcho. All rights reserved.

Ask HN: IMAP2Git

2 pointsby l0b0over 3 years ago
All mail clients suck. It seems every single one needs a lot of configuration effort to have a decent experience, most of them have really slow search, and several of them have unrecoverably deleted messages seemingly at random. I&#x27;m tempted to try managing my email using Git, one file per email. It&#x27;ll be super fast and reliable, and I won&#x27;t have to ever worry about losing my emails after they are safely copied to several separate devices. Is this feasible? Specifically:<p>- Is there any decent software to save all messages from the IMAP server to one file per message on a regular basis? They&#x27;d have to at least have some sensible filenames, like date + subject.<p>- Are there any Linux and Android clients which will read files from such a folder? I don&#x27;t mind to `adb push` the repository if necessary, but if I have to read them using a text editor that&#x27;ll be a blocker.

2 comments

sp332over 3 years ago
Some filesystems handle lots of small files gracefully and some don&#x27;t. Git and ext4 have come a long way but some programs are going to have a hard time once you get that many files in one folder. I haven&#x27;t seen any benchmarks for Android filesystems but I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised if it&#x27;s terribly slow.
评论 #29356185 未加载
daviddever23boxover 3 years ago
Unsure that per-file message storage via Git is any better than a SQLite-based client; prove me wrong.