The Mail.app searching now is so fast, it's bordering the incredible. It's made me rethink the way I archive e-mail. I really no longer need to sort everything into monthly folders in order to find things.
The 9000 ways of searching things in Thunderbird are not always an advantage, I found it makes it really hard for me to find things, because I have to select so many things. The searching of Mail.app makes me get what I want within 2 seconds for 95% of the cases.
If it doesn't there's usually a sensible drop-down suggestion of where to search (body, subject, recipient, sender). And if that does not help you, you can always use the system-wide Spotlight to drill down even further.
I've moved from Thunderbird to Mail.app about a year ago, and have been pleasantly surprised. I'm a pretty heavy mailer, receiving hundreds of mails a day and sending out 30-50. I also search my archives regularly and that has not been a problem.
I've not tried filtering into folders, but your mailserver should do that for you anyway.
The 9000 ways of searching things in Thunderbird are not always an advantage, I found it makes it really hard for me to find things, because I have to select so many things. The searching of Mail.app makes me get what I want within 2 seconds for 95% of the cases. If it doesn't there's usually a sensible drop-down suggestion of where to search (body, subject, recipient, sender). And if that does not help you, you can always use the system-wide Spotlight to drill down even further.
I've moved from Thunderbird to Mail.app about a year ago, and have been pleasantly surprised. I'm a pretty heavy mailer, receiving hundreds of mails a day and sending out 30-50. I also search my archives regularly and that has not been a problem.
I've not tried filtering into folders, but your mailserver should do that for you anyway.