I have a lot of email stretching back years, and I find I need to search it reasonably regularly, to find business contacts, receipts, that sort of thing. Thunderbird isn't very good at searching, even messages store locally. While it does index messages it also seems to index messages that have been moved or deleted, and half the time when it finds a message and I double click to open it can't find the message body. Basically Thunderbird search doesn't seem to work properly.

I'd like to export all my email from thunderbird and gmail to some kind of archiving and search system. I'd like to hear if anyone else has done this, their thoughts and experience.

Systems I've found:
 - MailStore. It's free for personal use, imports gmail (which has awesome search but has to be searched from the web interface), and the couple of reviews found seem fine.
 - DBMail. It seems to store all your email in a RDBMS, not sure what kind of a UI it has. Very technical website which I can't really be bothered reading right now. Seems to be unix based, which doesn't help me much.

Other systems seem to install an IMAP server on my PC, which I don't really want to bother with.

Other thoughts, suggestions, and systems welcome - though please don't tell me not to bother, as happened when someone asked a similar question on Slashdot.

Also, I'm not really a fan of Outlook for home use, I just don't like the UI much, and it makes things I want to do more difficult than necessary. It's fine at work for regular stuff.