Comment Thinking along the same lines as the OP (Score 1) 388
I too have thought about a replacement for Thunderbird if the bottom falls out. I do use multiple email clients throughout the day but at the end of my day when I get home, I use Thunderbird to download the emails (I use POP at home as I don't really need to look at those emails remotely) to store them locally. I do not like having my emails out there on the internet for long periods of time. I use Windows 10 but also dabble with Linux. I like the fact that I can take my Thunderbird folder with my emails and just copy them wholesale to another installation of Thunderbird and with minimal interaction on my part, have my email back the way it was. Outlook's PST's are almost as simple, Export to a PST file, copy it to a thumb drive and voila! A backup that I can then import to another Outlook installation. But they don't have Outlook in Linux (correct me if I'm wrong, I'm sure you guys will). If I used IMAP for all my email clients I could really care less. But having a 'physical' copy of my emails that is backed up offsite is something that drove me to using email clients to begin with, and Thunderbird since I like it's interface and capability of handling multiple email accounts.