How do I easily access archived old Mail?

I have over 5000 emails in my Mail Inbox folders, over 9000 in my Sent folders. I am worried that at some point it will be too many and the Mail storage system would become corrupted. I would like to archive out the older emails, but still have easy access to them.
The instructions for archiving mail is to archive entire folders. I could move old email to a like named mailbox and then archive all the old ones together. I would have to reimport them to look at them though. Back to square 1 and a mess to redo just to see one old email.
Sooo. If a created a user account with a different login, could I import that old mail archive into that user account's mail and have it available with a simple relogin? Would the old email find it's way via some hidden id number back into the original Mail program? That is, would the two instances of Mail be completely independent even if the emails had the same originating instance?
Also, is there a way to have two users logged into one computer without losing performance?

It doesn't matter what folder it is in, all the mail is in Mail. How many mails can Mail track before it loses it's cohesion and starts dropping them? All DB software has it's limits, and this is Mail (free) in 10.6, not Oracle. There's a reason Mail has a rebuild mailbox command. Look it up and it will tell you to run it when messages disappear. With about 20000 emails I am concerned. I would also just like to reduce the number of results I have when searching without loosing access to old emails because I may need them.
This is for a business and the volume of new email increases every year as processes go from local and paper to remote and electronic. I do not want to switch to Windows.
Thank you for your response.

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