# rustmailer/bichon

Bichon – A lightweight, high-performance Rust email archiver with WebUI

Repository: https://github.com/rustmailer/bichon
Canonical: https://ross.abutalabs.com/products/bichon
Language: Rust
License: AGPL-3.0
License Family: copyleft
Topics: backup, compression, email, email-archiver, email-archiving, imap, mail, oauth2, openapi, rust, search, self-hosted, selfhosted, tantivy, webui
Last push: 2026-08-25T17:11:57+00:00

## Health v2 (maintenance only)
Score: 83/100 (v2, computed 2026-09-03T02:20:16.233290+00:00)
- activity 99, release rhythm 98, longevity 20
- inputs: {"age_days": 288, "days_push": 8, "days_rel": 14, "gap_med": 2.0, "n_releases_24m": 45}
- flags: none
- formula: round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10)

## Adoption (not part of the score)
Stars 1931, forks 79 (observed 2026-08-28T04:05:56.015921+00:00)

## What it is
Bichon is a self-hosted email archiving server written in Rust that downloads emails from IMAP accounts, builds a full-text search index, and serves a REST API with an embedded WebUI. It is designed for long-term email preservation, unified cross-account search, and programmatic access to archived mail.

## Use cases
- archive emails from multiple IMAP accounts into one searchable store
- search across all my archived mailboxes with full-text search
- back up my email for long-term preservation
- self-host an email archive with a web interface
- programmatically access archived emails via a REST API
- receive emails via SMTP into an archive
- compress and deduplicate email storage

## When to choose
- you need long-term, searchable email archiving rather than an email client
- you want a lightweight, high-performance self-hosted solution in Rust
- you need unified search across multiple IMAP accounts
- you want programmatic access to archived email via REST API

## When to avoid
- you need to send, compose, forward, or reply to emails
- you want a full email client or webmail replacement
- you need a managed/cloud-hosted archiving service

## Facets
- artifact type: application
- maturity: active
- function: search-engine, email, backup, compression, http-server, api-framework, caching
- domain: email, self-hosted, developer-tools
- platform: windows, self-hosted, rust
- tags: email-archiving, imap, full-text-search, tantivy, oauth2, webui, rest-api, openapi, mail-backup, search, backup, linux, macos, docker, web-server

## Member repositories
- rustmailer/bichon (main) score 83

## Provenance
- Observed fields: from GitHub, fetched 2026-08-28T04:05:56.015921+00:00.
- Health v2: computed from the inputs above; adoption is never an input.
- Inferred fields (summary, facets, guidance): AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, on 2026-08-30T03:08:42.524950+00:00, confidence not recorded.
  - readme: https://github.com/rustmailer/bichon (fetched 2026-08-28T04:05:56.015921+00:00, sha e4532bc04434)
- Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00.