Advice on email backup

[H <ag...@me...>]

I am trying to consolidate multiple backups I have of several of my email accounts. The backups have all been made using isync but to different computers, thus different hostnames, and during different time periods.

In order to consolidate this mess and clear out duplicates of emails I have backed up I am thinking of the following:

-    Move all emails into one and the same directory structure on a new machine, ie matching email addresses and the cur/new/tmp structure when copying to this new machine.

-    With this consolidate email directory in place, use md5sum to find duplicates.

-    Delete any duplicates so there is only one copy of each md5sum matched email. This means that the hostname that is part of the email message filename will vary among all the different emails.

-    Find a suitable email program that I can use on this server backup to prune any emails I do not want to save for posterity.

-    I should now have one clean and pruned email backup.

To the above I can add that I normally use Thunderbird to manage my emails on the external email server. I do realize I need to use some other Linux email client when pruning the consolidated email backup.

Does the above make sense? If so, which Linux email client would you suggest to prune the consolidate email directories?