Sorry, my laptop where I had evolution got a new OS installed and I haven't configured it yet and just started mutt, but my original setup had a local archive folder, with sub-folders per year (I think, I even had a higher level grouping of 5 or 10 years). Unfortunately, I don't have setup right now to check, but I think it was semi-manual, like Evolution was archiving to a local folder automatically, then every new year I just moved the mails from the previous year into a folder).

Re offlineimap, just looked into isync/mbsync suggested here by others, it seems better from the description, I'm probably going to try it when I have some time: https://people.kernel.org/mcgrof/replacing-offlineimap-with-...