mailarchiver

A lightweight Crystal application that fetches, indexes, and archives email messages via POP3.
It stores messages as .eml files and indexes headers in SQLite with FTS5 for fast search.

Usage

TBC

Roadmap

• Basic POP3 client integration (via pop3client shard)

• CLI fetcher command with UIDL-based pipeline

• Atomic spool writes (.part → rename)

• Importer command

  • Parse message headers (From, To, Cc, Date, Subject, Message-Id)
  • Enrich SQLite index with metadata
  • Move .eml files from spool/incoming into structured archive folders (archive/YYYY/MM/DD/)

• Duplicate handling & resilience

  • Enforce unique (account_id, uidl) and sha256
  • Skip already imported messages gracefully
  • Safe resume after crash

• Search & reporting

  • Implement CLI search command using SQLite FTS5
  • Show matches with basic metadata (date, from, subject)

• Show messages

  • Option to show .eml formatted as plain text (or as JSON)

Next

• Configuration & CLI improvements

  • More options to manage accounts
  • Verbosity/logging flags
  • Exit codes aligned with UNIX conventions

• Packaging & distribution

  • Prebuilt binaries (Linux/Windows)

Future ideas

• IMAP support (optional)
• Web UI for browsing/searching messages
• Export to mbox/mboxrd for interoperability
• Simple REST API for integration with other tools

Contributing

1. Fork it (https://github.com/chrisblunt-codes/mailarchiver/fork)
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create a new Pull Request

Contributors

• Chris Blunt - creator and maintainer

License

Copyright 2025 Chris Blunt Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 SPDX-License-Identifier: Apache-2.0