Recommendation: Mail-Archiver – simple & efficient email archiving
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Hi everyone,
Since there are frequent questions here about email archiving solutions, I’d like to share a small but very practical open-source project that I’ve been using for about a week now:
Project: Mail-Archiver on GitHubI’ve been running Mail-Archiver locally and I’m extremely satisfied so far.
The setup was straightforward, the interface is clean, and the archiving works reliably and efficiently. For me, this tool fills exactly the gap I’ve been looking to solve, without adding unnecessary complexity.Maybe this will be interesting for some of you as well.
If anyone has questions about the setup or integration, I’m happy to help.Best,
Michael@Kubernetes did you deploy on Cloudron or via docker compose ?
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@Kubernetes did you deploy on Cloudron or via docker compose ?
@timconsidine No, but I did deploy on my server at home via docker compose.
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I haven't looked into email archiving since I started self-hosting, but I was thinking that I could simply download the mail folder from the server and open/view the emails locally on my PC via some client. Is this possible? If not, I'm guessing this is where an app like the above comes into play right?
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Sure.
Real mail archiving retains all mails, even after they get deleted by someone or some event (audit-proof) -
There’s also OpenArchiver, pretty new, which looks nice (mentioned here: https://forum.cloudron.io/post/111626, GitHub here: https://github.com/LogicLabs-OU/OpenArchiver). Standard Docker.
The decisive feature for any Mail Archiver is search. It doesn’t help if a message was archived when I can’t find it. The gold standard MailStore (free „Home“ edition but Windows only) even indexes attachments that are full-text searchable.
EDIT 20250928: There’s now an app request topic here: https://forum.cloudron.io/topic/14332/
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There’s also OpenArchiver, pretty new, which looks nice (mentioned here: https://forum.cloudron.io/post/111626, GitHub here: https://github.com/LogicLabs-OU/OpenArchiver). Standard Docker.
The decisive feature for any Mail Archiver is search. It doesn’t help if a message was archived when I can’t find it. The gold standard MailStore (free „Home“ edition but Windows only) even indexes attachments that are full-text searchable.
EDIT 20250928: There’s now an app request topic here: https://forum.cloudron.io/topic/14332/
@necrevistonnezr I like the Search in OpenArchiver, but overall I like Mail-Archiver a bit more. However, thanks for adding to the thread.
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The subject of mail archiving is interesting and this piece of software (Mail Archiver) too. It would be great to have this as an app in the AppStore.
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Hello there,
I am also testing both openarchiver (OA) and mailarchiver (MA) using docker-compose.
Here is my feedback:- UI: both software are similar but the preview page in OA seems nicer to me and has a thread functionality on the sidebar wich is quite useful;
- SEARCH: MA has better search functionalities;
- EXPORT: export in MA is great as you can search and export results in one shot, while OA seems to consent only one message at a time download;
- SOFTWARE: MA is based on ASP.NET Core 8 MVC application wich does not seems nice to me;
- STORAGE: in OA messages are stored in folder as .eml files, while in MA all is in the postgresdb;
- ACTIVITY: both MA and OA seems very active, but I've contacted OA for partenering and to have some clarification on encryption, but still no answers (note: just writed friday morning...).
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@josephcosta do you have an idea how the archivers work? Are they using IMAP to get the emails or some hooks in postfix?
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@josephcosta do you have an idea how the archivers work? Are they using IMAP to get the emails or some hooks in postfix?
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@josephcosta do you have an idea how the archivers work? Are they using IMAP to get the emails or some hooks in postfix?
@joseph openarchiver use IMAP too and has also a similar way to connect to other providers.
mailarchiver can connect to Microsoft 365 mail accounts via Microsoft Graph API.
Both OA and MA can import mbox/eml files.
OA can also import PST, at least according to the docs. -
Maybe to add, that my experience with oepnarchiver was that it took much longer to archive new emails, because the crawling through all emails was slow. This is much faster with mailarchiver for me.
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Maybe to add, that my experience with oepnarchiver was that it took much longer to archive new emails, because the crawling through all emails was slow. This is much faster with mailarchiver for me.
@Kubernetes I agree with you that MA seems much more robust and the developement is also quite active (while I still do not have a feedback from OA):
My doubt is mainly about:
- all is in the PG database;
- ASP.NETCore8 MVC
While the first one is not that terrible, I am uneasy with an ASP.NETCore product, what do you think about this framework?
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Mail-Archiver does not index and search email attachments: https://github.com/s1t5/mail-archiver/blob/main/doc/Search.md
That‘s a no-go for me. -
@Kubernetes I agree with you that MA seems much more robust and the developement is also quite active (while I still do not have a feedback from OA):
My doubt is mainly about:
- all is in the PG database;
- ASP.NETCore8 MVC
While the first one is not that terrible, I am uneasy with an ASP.NETCore product, what do you think about this framework?
@josephcosta I agree with you and I don't like ASP.NET because I am not familiar with it. But however, if the developer knows his stuff, I am okay with it.
@necrevistonnezr I agree with you, index and search for attachments would be great. Maybe it will be added sometime later? I also think the fuzzy search in Openarchiver is something I miss in Mailarchiver.
