Self-Hosted Bichon: Searchable IMAP Email Archives in Rust

Your lawyer asks for every email with a vendor from 2019. The SaaS mailbox holds ninety days. Thunderbird folders on a laptop that left the company three hires ago do not count as a retention policy.

Bichon is a purpose-built answer: ~2k GitHub stars, AGPL-3.0, a Rust email archiver with a Web UI — not a replacement for Gmail or Roundcube. It pulls mail over IMAP (password or OAuth 2.0), stores it with compression and deduplication, indexes everything for search, and exposes REST plus Swagger docs. It does not send mail; optional SMTP is receive-only for gateway capture.

What it actually does

Think long-term mailbox backup you can actually query:

• Multi-account IMAP sync — concurrent downloads, incremental UID-based updates, UIDVALIDITY rebuilds when folders reset.
• Full-text search — Tantivy index across subject, body, addresses, attachment metadata; filters by date, size, tags, file types.
• Threads and attachments — conversation grouping, attachment browser, faceted tags for legal or project labels.
• Imports — EML trees, MBOX (including Gmail exports), Thunderbird profiles, Outlook PST via CLI; EML upload in the UI.
• Export and restore — MBOX export, bulk restore back to IMAP when you need messages live again.
• RBAC — multi-user roles with account-level isolation (Admin, Manager, Member, custom permissions).
• Embedded stack — no Postgres or Elasticsearch required; blob store + index live under one data directory.

Scheduled cron syncs, SOCKS5 per account, remote image blocking, and dashboard stats round out ops-friendly archiving — cron-friendly for a Canadian VPS that mirrors order@ or client mailboxes without trusting a third-party archive SaaS.

Why self-host?

Retention is yours. Litigation, tax audits, and PIPEDA access requests need mail that outlives the provider's default trash window. Bichon on your disk with encrypted credential storage (BICHON_ENCRYPT_PASSWORD) keeps archives under your backup policy.

Unified search across accounts. Agencies and small legal teams search one index spanning multiple IMAP inboxes instead of logging into five webmails.

No external database tax. Single-volume Docker deploy suits modest Swift Host VPS plans — watch disk growth and dedupe wins on attachment-heavy threads.

Programmatic access. OpenAPI endpoints and API tokens integrate with scripts; not everything needs a human clicking the Web UI.

AGPL-3.0. Fine for internal archive infrastructure; read obligations if you offer Bichon as a multi-tenant service to outsiders.

What running it takes

Docker is the happy path:

docker run -d --name bichon -p 15630:15630 \
  -v ./bichon-data:/data --user 1000:1000 \
  -e BICHON_ROOT_DIR=/data \
  -e BICHON_ENCRYPT_PASSWORD=your-secure-password \
  rustmailer/bichon:latest

Open port 15630, log in (default admin / admin@bichon — change immediately), add IMAP accounts, start initial sync. Put nginx TLS in front for anything beyond localhost; set BICHON_PUBLIC_URL for OAuth redirects.

• Disk — plan for full mailbox size minus dedupe; monitor bichon-data volume.
• Backups — snapshot the entire data directory; losing BICHON_ENCRYPT_PASSWORD loses stored credentials.
• Security — restrict CORS in production; do not expose the UI to the open internet without auth hardening.

Binary releases exist for Linux, macOS, and Windows if Docker is not your style.

Who it's for (and who should skip it)

Good fit: MSPs archiving client mail, shops keeping a searchable copy of order@ alongside live IMAP, compliance-conscious SMBs, anyone migrating off "we'll find it in PST somewhere."

Maybe skip it: if you need daily email composition, use webmail or Mailcow — Bichon will frustrate you. If Google Workspace already meets legal hold with Vault and budget, duplicating may be waste. If you will not backup terabytes, do not sync terabytes.

Hosting it in Canada

Bichon fits a VPS with fast disk and nightly volume backups — Beauharnois or Toronto, private URL, TLS, firewall. Pair with live mail on Swift Host or Mail-in-a-Box; Bichon is the read-mostly vault.

Tell us mailbox count, approximate GB, and retention years if you want disk sizing before the first full IMAP pull.

Need mail you can search five years from now? Talk with Swift Host — we are in St. Albert and actually answer the phone.