Bichon

Bichon is a lightweight, high-performance email archiving server designed to synchronize mail from IMAP accounts into a local, searchable archive. It focuses on long-term retention, organization, and fast discovery of historical email, rather than sending or real-time communication.

Key Features

• Continuous synchronization from one or more IMAP accounts, with unified search across accounts
• Full-text indexing for fast search across sender, subject, body, date, size, attachments, and more
• Built-in Web UI with multilingual support for browsing, threads, bulk cleanup, and export
• REST API with OpenAPI documentation for programmatic access
• OAuth2 authentication support for IMAP providers (with token refresh) alongside password login
• Compressed storage with deduplication to reduce disk usage
• Tagging and facets for organizing and filtering archived mail
• Multi-user support with role-based access control (RBAC)
• Import tooling for existing archives (EML, MBOX, PST) via CLI

Use Cases

• Centralized archiving of multiple mailboxes for fast historical search and retrieval
• Creating an offline, local searchable archive to reduce dependency on mailbox server retention
• Programmatic analysis and integration of archived email via a REST API

Limitations and Considerations

• Not an email client: it does not send email and is not intended for real-time inbox workflows
• Browser access may require explicit CORS configuration depending on deployment and version

Bichon is well-suited for individuals or teams that need a dedicated email archive with strong search, efficient storage, and an API-first interface. Its standalone design avoids external database dependencies while still providing a modern web experience for managing archived mail.