Missing Search Option

[LValance]

Hi Open Archiver Team,

first of all, thank you for creating such a great open-source email archiving solution.

We are currently introducing Open Archiver as our central email archive in a medium-sized company and have been testing it extensively in a real production environment.

During our rollout we identified several areas where Open Archiver could become even more attractive for enterprise users while keeping its current simplicity.

Our most important suggestions (and also biggest pain point) are:

1. Advanced Search (similar to The Bat! / MailStore)

Many business users search for emails using combinations such as:

From
To
Subject
Date range
Attachments
File type
Mailbox / Ingestion source
Saved searches
Relative dates (Today, Last Week, Last Month, Last Year)

The current full-text search is already fast thanks to Meilisearch, but an advanced search dialog would significantly improve usability.
As we are using "Ritlabs The Bat!" since years, we often use this kind of search option

2. Multi User Permissions

Every employee should only be able to search and view his own archive.

Examples:

Employee → own mailbox
Team leader → own mailbox + shared mailboxes
Management → all archives
Administrator → system administration (without automatic access to all archived content)
3. Shared Mailboxes

Support for shared archives such as:

info@
sales@
accounting@

with multiple assigned users.

4. Saved Searches

Users should be able to save searches like:

Bank statements
Orders
Contracts

and reuse them with one click.

5. Enterprise Dashboard

Instead of global statistics, normal users should only see:

their archived emails
their storage usage
last synchronization
recent searches

Global statistics should remain available for administrators.

6. Outlook / The Bat! style UI

A three-pane layout (Search → Result List → Preview) would make Open Archiver much easier to use for office staff.

We created several UI concepts and mockups based on our daily work.

We would be happy to contribute ideas, test new features and provide feedback from a real business environment.

We have just created some mockup (AI generated) stu


ff.

Here’s a little anecdote: While I was in university, I had a part-time job at the building department. They had a huge archive of construction plans and building permits in the basement. Absolutely every plan and permit dating back more than 100 years was kept there—and there was pretty much exactly one employee who could actually find anything in there.

The best archiving solution is one that lets you find what you’re looking for.

Based on our tests, import and data storage are already very well implemented—only the search function is missing.

Thank you again for your great work!