Bichon

Bichon is a self-hosted email archiving server that downloads messages from multiple IMAP accounts concurrently, stores them for long-term preservation, builds a full-text index, and provides a REST API and embedded WebUI. It supports password and OAuth 2.0 authentication, incremental fetching, scheduled downloads, cross-account search, conversation threads, attachment browsing, tags, contacts, analytics, imports, MBOX export, and bulk restoration to original IMAP accounts. Embedded storage covers search indexes, compressed message blobs, and relational metadata without external dependencies, while content hashing avoids storing identical bodies and attachments more than once.

It is for users and organizations that want to preserve email under their own control, search authorized accounts together, and access archived messages programmatically. Multi-user roles, granular permissions, and account-level isolation support teams with different access needs. External images and tracking pixels are blocked by default.

The research does not identify a specific paid product that Bichon replaces, so no product-level price or feature comparison is supported. Its main limitation is functional rather than archival: Bichon is not an email client. It does not compose, send, forward, or reply to messages, and its optional SMTP server only receives mail. People needing everyday mailbox communication would still need an email client.