Bichon

A lightweight, high-performance Rust email archiver with WebUI

Bichon is a minimal, high-performance, standalone Rust email archiver with a built-in WebUI. Its name is inspired by the puppy my daughter adopted last month. It runs as a single binary, requires no external dependencies, and provides fast, efficient email archiving, management, and search.

🚀 Features

⚡ Lightweight & Standalone

• Pure Rust, single-machine application.
• No external database required.
• Includes WebUI for intuitive management.

📬 Multi-Account Management

• Synchronize and download emails from multiple accounts.
• Flexible selection: by date range, number of emails, or specific mailboxes.

🔑 IMAP & OAuth2 Authentication

• Supports IMAP password or OAuth2 login.
• Built-in WebUI for OAuth2 authorization, including automatic token refresh (e.g., Gmail, Outlook).
• Supports network proxy for IMAP and OAuth2.
• Automatic IMAP server discovery and configuration.

🔍 Unified Multi-Account Search

• Powerful search across all accounts:
  account, mailbox, sender, attachment name, has attachments, size, date, subject, body.

🏷️ Tags & Facets

• Organize archived emails using tags backed by Tantivy facets.
• Efficiently filter and locate emails based on these facet-based tags.

💾 Compressed & Deduplicated Storage

• Store emails efficiently with transparent compression and deduplication—emails can be read directly without any extra steps.

📂 Email Management & Viewing

• Bulk cleanup of local archives.
• Download emails as EML or attachments separately.
• View and browse emails directly.
• View the full conversation thread of any email.

📊 Dashboard & Analytics

• Visualize email statistics: counts, time distribution, top senders, largest emails, account rankings.

🛠️ OpenAPI Support

• Provides OpenAPI documentation.
• Access token authentication for programmatic access.

🐾 Why Create Bichon?

A few months ago, I released rustmailer, an email API middleware:
https://github.com/rustmailer/rustmailer

Since then, I’ve received many emails asking whether it could also archive emails, perform unified search, and support full-text indexing—not just querying recipients.
But rustmailer was designed as a middleware focused on providing API services.
Adding archiving and full-text search would complicate its core purpose and go far beyond its original scope.

Meanwhile, I realized that email archiving itself only requires a small portion of rustmailer’s functionality, plus a search engine.
With that combination, building a dedicated, efficient archiver becomes much simpler.

Using the experience gained from rustmailer, I designed and built Bichon in less than two weeks, followed by another two weeks of testing and optimization.
It has now reached a stable, usable state—and I decided to release it publicly.

Bichon is completely free.
You can download and use it however you like.
It’s not perfect, but I hope it brings you value.

📸 Snapshot

🚀 Quick Start

Docker Deployment (Recommended)

# Pull the image
docker pull rustmailer/bichon:latest

# Create data directory
mkdir -p ./bichon-data

# Run container
docker run -d \
  --name bichon \
  -p 15630:15630 \
  -v $(pwd)/bichon-data:/data \
  -e BICHON_LOG_LEVEL=info \
  -e BICHON_ROOT_DIR=/data \
  rustmailer/bichon:latest

• If you are accessing Bichon on the same machine where it is installed (Machine A), open:

  http://localhost:15630
  

• If you are accessing Bichon from another machine (Machine B), make sure to set CORS with the IP of Machine B, for example:

# Run container
docker run -d \
  --name bichon \
  -p 15630:15630 \
  -v $(pwd)/bichon-data:/data \
  -e BICHON_LOG_LEVEL=info \
  -e BICHON_ROOT_DIR=/data \
  -e BICHON_CORS_ORIGINS="http://localhost:15630,http://B_MACHINE_IP:15630,*" \
  rustmailer/bichon:latest

Access instructions: This allows Machine B to access the Bichon interface on Machine A via a browser.

Binary Deployment

Download the appropriate binary for your platform from the Releases page:

• Linux (GNU): bichon-x.x.x-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.gz
• Linux (MUSL): bichon-x.x.x-x86_64-unknown-linux-musl.tar.gz
• macOS: bichon-x.x.x-x86_64-apple-darwin.tar.gz
• Windows: bichon-x.x.x-x86_64-pc-windows-msvc.zip

Extract and run:

# Linux/macOS
./bichon --bichon-root-dir /tmp/bichon-data

# Windows
.\bichon.exe --bichon-root-dir e:\bichon-data

🔑 Root User Login Information

Bichon currently supports a single Root user login for system access and management.

First Login and Enabling Access

To enable the login feature, you must specify a command-line argument or set an environment variable when starting Bichon.

1. Command-Line Argument

Add the --bichon-enable-access-token flag to your startup command:

# Linux/macOS Binary Deployment Example
./bichon --bichon-root-dir /tmp/bichon-data --bichon-enable-access-token

2. Environment Variable (Recommended for Docker)

Set the environment variable BICHON_ENABLE_ACCESS_TOKEN to true:

# Docker Deployment Example
docker run -d \
  --name bichon \
  -p 15630:15630 \
  -v $(pwd)/bichon-data:/data \
  -e BICHON_LOG_LEVEL=info \
  -e BICHON_ROOT_DIR=/data \
  -e BICHON_ENABLE_ACCESS_TOKEN=true \
  rustmailer/bichon:latest

Default Credentials

• Initial Login Account: root
• Initial Password: root

Changing the Password

It is strongly recommended that you change the default password immediately after your first login.

You can change the password via the WebUI:

1. Log in to the WebUI.
2. Navigate to the Settings page.
3. Use the Reset Root Password option to modify your password.

📖 Documentation

Under construction. Documentation will be available soon.

🛠️ Tech Stack

• Backend: Rust + Poem
• Frontend: React + TypeScript + Vite + ShadCN UI
• Core Engine (Storage & Search): Tantivy
  • Acts as both the primary storage for email content and the full-text search index. This unified approach ensures high performance and eliminates data redundancy.
• Metadata Storage: Native_DB
  • Used exclusively for lightweight configuration and account metadata.
• Email Protocols: IMAP (Supports standard Password & OAuth2)

🤝 Contributing

Issues and Pull Requests are welcome!

🧑‍💻 Developer Guide

To build or contribute to Bichon, the following environment is recommended:

Prerequisites

• Rust: Use the latest stable toolchain for best compatibility and performance.
• Node.js: Version 20+ is required.
• pnpm: Recommended package manager for the WebUI.

Steps

1. Clone the repository

git clone https://github.com/rustmailer/bichon.git
cd bichon

2. Build the WebUI

cd web
pnpm install
pnpm run build

Run the WebUI in development mode if needed:

pnpm run dev

3. Build or Run the Backend

After the WebUI is built, return to the project root:

cd ..
cargo build

Or run directly:

cargo run -- --bichon-root-dir e:\bichon-data

--bichon-root-dir specifies the directory where all Bichon data will be stored.

WebUI Access

• The WebUI runs on http://localhost:15630 by default.
• HTTPS is not enabled in development or default builds.

📄 License

This project is licensed under AGPLv3.

🔗 Links

• Docker Hub
• Issue Tracker
• Discord