The problem
Most email tools assume you want them in your inbox forever. The privacy-conscious half of the market wants the opposite: archive everything older than ninety days, search it locally, and never give a third party the keys to read it. We built for that audience.
What we built
AutoArchive ships as a static front-end behind Nginx, a small Node contact handler, and a SQLite-backed archive on disk. Newsletter capture runs through Brevo without exposing your subscriber list to a vendor that might pivot. The whole thing fits on a small VPS and runs on hardware you can describe in a sentence.
The automation angle
The interesting work is the email-in pipeline. Inbound mail goes through a deterministic rules layer (header fingerprints, list-IDs, content patterns) and only the fall-throughs hit anything fancy. The result is a system you can audit by reading 200 lines of code, which is the right answer for a privacy product.
How it’s used
- Privacy-conscious individuals who want their inbox under their own roof.
- Newsletter operators who want a lightweight signup that doesn’t leak.
- Small businesses with a fixed contact form they can trust.
What it taught us
That “boring stack” is a feature when the audience cares about privacy. Every avoided dependency is a vector that doesn’t need explaining. AutoArchive is one of the smallest projects in the portfolio and one of the easiest to keep running.