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Comment by znnajdla | Hacker News Reader

I’m been meaning to build something like this myself. Seems like this was designed to be run on a server, however. What if I want to run it locally on a laptop that’s not always on? Does it recover gracefully from restarts and such? Is it a SQLite database I can query myself? Does it have an immutable archive/backup mode with trash recovery?

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Sorry, I don't know all the answers. However, I do know this (from the README):

> Core Engine (Storage & Search): Tantivy[1] > 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.

[1] https://github.com/quickwit-oss/tantivy

You are right.

If looking for local email, why not a traditional client (thunderbird, claws, even outlook) or the more flexible/cli friendly maildir and notmuch? There are a bunch of front ends, including WebUIs https://notmuchmail.org/frontends/

Is what you're looking for a pretty good fit for how email was originally used? Or am missing something obvious

Actually, that is what I would like, but if I use Thunderbird on my Maildirs (served by Dovecot), the search (particularly in the mail body) is not really feasible. Perhaps there is a search integration for Dovecot that I am not aware of??

I just learned that I can enable full text search on the server on Dovecot through Xapian, which is now indexing..!

Bichon can run on a laptop, and restarts or reboots are not a problem — you just need to make sure it starts automatically when the system boots. It is a standalone executable that is configured via command-line arguments or environment variables.

I’ve also been considering packaging it as a desktop application so that non-technical users can use it more easily, since there are Rust projects that can help wrap Bichon into a desktop app.

What I would like is an app that I can let loose on my Maildir directory and indexes and allows search. It doesn't need to receive mails or download (or send) them.

You can check out https://github.com/rustmailer/bichon/wiki/Using-Bichonctl-Fo... — it explains how to use bichonctl to batch-import .eml files into Bichon. This makes it easy to ingest Maildir or any folder of EMLs for indexing and search.

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