January 10, 2026
Who let the emails out?
Bichon: A lightweight, high-performance Rust email archiver with WebUI
Meet Bichon, the email hoarder app: geeks cheer, lawyers flinch, skeptics bark
TLDR: Bichon is a free tool to save and search emails across accounts via a web app. Commenters love the idea but argue over licensing doubts, legal “sync vs download” implications, and whether it handles offline laptops—all wrapped in dog jokes and real archiving angst.
Bichon just bounded into the inbox with puppy energy: a free, open-source tool that downloads and indexes your emails so you can search everything fast from a simple web page. It doesn’t send email—this is a pure archive-and-search dog. Fans are wagging their tails over multi-account unified search, tags, compressed storage, and a slick WebUI. One commenter basically threw confetti: finally, no more duct-taped scripts! Dog lovers also chimed in with actual bichon pride, because of course they did.
But the comments aren’t just belly rubs. The hottest take is licensing drama: a skeptic warns that the related rustmailer project has a restrictive license, hinting, don’t expect to be able to use this, lighting up a debate about how “free” this really is. Compliance hawks raise a serious eyebrow at the word “sync,” arguing it’s really download, which could be a legal problem if an email vanishes before it’s archived. Meanwhile, practical folks ask if this puppy behaves on a laptop that naps—does it recover after restarts, can you poke the database directly, and is there an immutable mode for backups? The vibe: excitement from DIYers, warnings from lawyers, and skeptic barks about licensing, with memes and fur puns sprinkled on top.
Key Points
- •Bichon is an open-source Rust server application for archiving and searching emails, not for sending or receiving.
- •It synchronizes emails from IMAP servers, indexes them for full-text search, and exposes a REST API with a built-in WebUI.
- •Core differences from clients include no sending capability, server-side runtime, local archive storage, and unified multi-account search.
- •Features include IMAP and OAuth2 auth, flexible fetching, proxy and auto IMAP discovery, Tantivy-based tags, compression/deduplication, and analytics.
- •The project was built using experience from rustmailer, developed in under two weeks plus testing, released free, with Docker quick start and updated CORS behavior in v0.1.4.