Bichon connects to the IMAP server via IMAP and uses a sync interval, for example 10 minutes. Every 10 minutes, Bichon downloads emails from the IMAP server to the local machine, then stores and indexes them. If an email is permanently deleted within that interval, Bichon has no way to detect it. That is indeed how Bichon currently works.

For anyone reading, I would highly recommend steering clear of EmailEngine.

I am the author of Bichon. Long-term backup and permanent archival features are not currently on Bichon’s roadmap, but you’re very welcome to open a GitHub issue to share your idea. Bichon is entirely driven by user needs, and any good suggestions or plans can be adopted and implemented.

I’m the author of Bichon, so let me clarify this.

First, rustmailer is my GitHub username. Under this GitHub account there are two main projects: RustMailer and Bichon.

RustMailer is a middleware product with the same name. It is commercially licensed. I hope it can help developers save time on email-related development and also generate a bit of income for me, so this middleware requires a license key to run long-term.

Bichon, on the other hand, is an independent project built on the experience of developing RustMailer. It does reuse a lot of similar code, but it is licensed under the AGPL. These are two completely different projects. RustMailer provides many API interfaces similar to EmailEngine and is positioned as middleware, while Bichon is an email archiving (or unified search) project.

Bichon is positioned as a permanently free project. Users never need to worry that if you use Bichon today you will be asked to pay later — you can use it with confidence, and all of its code is fully open and transparent.

RustMailer (a separate project) has a commercial license: https://github.com/rustmailer/rustmailer/blob/main/LICENSE

> RustMailer is source-available. The code is open on GitHub, but requires a valid commercial license key for production use.

License Purchase: https://rustmailer.com/pricing

The mention of BSD/Apache is from here[1] and looks to be a listing of open-source licenses that this project uses.

[1] https://github.com/rustmailer/rustmailer/blob/main/license.h...

This one appears to be AGPL and safe to use, but I just read the main project license and frowned. I'm not sure I understand who that project is for.

actually the rustmailer licensing is a bit confusing. The license file in the repo has the text of the BSD Zero and Apache license but the README describes it as "source-available"?

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

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

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.