[Discuss] Scripting IMAP for large numbers of messages?

[me at mattgillen.net (Matthew Gillen)]

On 1/7/2021 9:32 AM, Daniel Barrett wrote:
> 
> Has anyone done any scripting to manipulate email on a remote IMAP
> server? I'd like to select about 50,000 emails from an Inbox of
> ~80,000 (say, all emails from 2020) and move them to a different
> folder on the same IMAP server. I'm wondering if fetchmail or similar
> tools can do this (but am open to other suggestions).
> 
> FYI, I've tried this operation in several GUI IMAP clients but they
> all either (1) fail for large numbers of messages, or (2) have such a
> cumbersome selection process (for "all emails from 2020") that it
> would take an hour to highlight all the emails.
> 
> Thanks for any tips, or even just a pointer to the best tool(s) for
> the job.

I'd be surprised if mutt didn't do the trick for you.  If you're a vi
person, you'll like mutt.

http://mutt.org/

Specific examples of tagging messages:
http://therandymon.com/woodnotes/mutt/node19.html


Matt