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kit·intermediate·updated 2026-07-11

InboxVault – Email Backup & Archive Kit

Own your email archive. Search it forever.

SvelteKitPostgreSQLMeilisearch
View on GitHub

Self-hosted email backup and search. Connect any IMAP account, sync your entire history, and search years of mail with Meilisearch-powered full-text search. Keep your archive under your control.

Install

~60 seconds
terminal
bash
git clone https://github.com/yashthakur1/MailVault.git
cd MailVault
npm install
cp .env.example .env
~/ what's inside

Already wired, so you can skip to features.

IMAP sync

Connect Gmail, Outlook, or any IMAP provider. Sync your entire mailbox history in the background.

Full-text search

Meilisearch indexes subjects, bodies, and attachment names. Find any email in milliseconds.

Clean web interface

Browse folders, read threads, and search your archive from a fast, responsive SvelteKit UI.

Self-hosted

Frontend, backend API, and workers all run on your own infrastructure. No third-party access to your mail.

~/ the stack behind it

Every dependency has a reason.

  • SvelteKit
    Frontend UI, server-rendered and served on its own dev port.
  • Node.js API + Workers
    Separate backend service plus background workers for IMAP sync — both run alongside the frontend via npm workspaces.
  • PostgreSQL + Drizzle ORM
    Type-safe schema and migrations for accounts, messages, and folders.
  • Meilisearch
    Full-text search across subjects, bodies, and attachments.
  • Valkey/Redis
    Backs the background job queue that drives IMAP sync.
~/ environment

Here's every env var, labeled.

Copy to .env.local. The included first-run script refuses to boot if any of them are missing — you'll know immediately.

.env.example
dotenv
DATABASE_URL=postgresql://user:pass@localhost:5432/mailvault
MEILI_HOST=http://localhost:7700
MEILI_MASTER_KEY=your-master-key-here
REDIS_HOST=localhost
REDIS_PORT=6379
JWT_SECRET=your-secure-random-string
~/ walkthrough

Zero to first deploy.

This is the exact sequence we'd run from a blank directory. Steps are reproducible — if one fails, we want to know.

  1. 1. Clone the repository

    Clone the monorepo and move into the project directory.

    git clone https://github.com/yashthakur1/MailVault.git
cd MailVault

  2. 2. Install dependencies

    Install all monorepo dependencies using npm workspaces — this covers the frontend, backend API, and workers in one pass.

    npm install

  3. 3. Configure environment variables

    Copy .env.example to .env and fill in your database, search, and queue credentials — DATABASE_URL, MEILI_HOST/MEILI_MASTER_KEY, REDIS_HOST/REDIS_PORT, and a JWT_SECRET for auth.

    cp .env.example .env

  4. 4. Run database migrations

    Generate and apply Drizzle migrations against your PostgreSQL database.

    npm run db:generate
npm run db:migrate

  5. 5. Start the development environment

    One command concurrently runs the SvelteKit frontend (http://localhost:3000), the backend API (http://localhost:4000), and the background workers that handle email ingestion and indexing.

    npm run dev:oss

  6. 6. Build and deploy

    Build the production bundles, then start the app server and the background workers as separate long-running processes (e.g. under pm2 or systemd).

    npm run build:oss
npm run start:oss

# in a separate terminal or service
npm run start:workers
~/ known gotchas

The stuff that ate our afternoons.

Things we'd have wanted a heads-up on. Logged as we hit them.

  • !The dev/build/start scripts are the `:oss` variants (dev:oss, build:oss, start:oss) — the plain npm run dev/build won't start the full stack in this monorepo.
  • !Workers run as a separate process from the app server — forgetting to start npm run start:workers in production means mail stops syncing even though the UI still loads.
  • !IMAP sync can be slow for large mailboxes (100k+ messages) — the initial sync runs in the background and can take hours.
  • !Gmail requires an app-specific password if you have 2FA enabled. Regular account passwords won't work.
  • !Meilisearch needs at least 1GB RAM for indexing large archives.
when not

If you need a full email client with sending, calendars, and contacts, this isn't it. InboxVault is read-only archival and search, not a replacement for your mail client.

license: MIT·star on github →

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