All 100 ideasEmail and chat
#59 of 100 · Email and chat
Your email and chats, archived locally
Automatic local backups of their email, chats and group archives into a searchable store, before a provider shuts down or locks them out.
Asks per year
What the askers want
- Would pay0%
- Want it local or private40%
- Object to subscriptions10%
- Want it open source or self-hosted20%
- Want AI to do it0%
Share of the 10 asks that say so, as judged by Jev.
What exists on Show HN
Tried, never finished11 Show HN launches do part of this. None does the whole job.
Instead of: Gmail, Outlook, WhatsApp, Skype
The idea, as matched
A tool that automatically backs up email and chat history (Gmail, Outlook, WhatsApp, Skype, Slack, mailing lists) into a local, searchable archive or database.
Jev first matched 12 requests to this idea; a second reader kept 10 of 12.
Every ask, newest first
Each line is an AI paraphrase of what the writer wanted. The link goes to their own words on Hacker News.
Reader’s note. Asks spike when Skype or Yahoo Groups shut down.
- May 2025Wants a WhatsApp to SQLite exporter like the Gmail one, to make their data more useful. Read it: a comment in “Gmail to SQLite”
- Feb 2025Wants a tool to back up old Skype chats before the service shuts down. Read it: a comment in “Microsoft is reportedly killing Skype after 14 years of neglect”
- Dec 2024Wants an automatic email backup service or tool, since they distrust providers and treasure old mail. Read it: a post: “Ask HN: Do you backup your Emails?”
- Aug 2022Asks whether a tool exists to back up their emails. Read it: a comment in “Hyperscrape: Steal user data from Gmail, Yahoo and Outlook”
- Jun 2021Wants a bot that captures an incident war room Slack channel as text for attaching to tickets. Read it: a post: “Ask HN: How to capture private slack channel conversations”
- Oct 2019Wants a way to move Yahoo Groups conversations into GNU Mailman for searching old threads. Read it: a comment in “Options for Saving Yahoo Groups Content”
- Oct 2019Wants an export tool for Google Groups, after splitting a Yahoo Groups archive into monthly mbox files. Read it: a comment in “Yahoo Groups to remove all content December 14”
- May 2018Wants an automated way to regularly download and remove all emails from Gmail. Read it: a comment in “Getting Google to ban our entire company”
- Oct 2015Wants a scheduled, Linux-friendly tool to back up email locally and search it, without a cloud service. Read it: a post: “Is there a tool to backup my email inbox”
- Oct 2011Wants software that saves a whole Exchange mailbox when POP3 and IMAP access are unavailable. Read it: a post: “Ask HN: Software to download email from Outlook Web Access?”
Building this?
Read ten of the asks above first, because they say what the existing launches miss. If you ship it, post it as a Show HN so the next run of this list finds it.
Ship it like Vercel, on a server you own
This site runs on ShipTiffin. A push to GitHub deploys it, the way it would on Vercel, but the server is a Hetzner box in your own account. Postgres, sign-in, email, jobs and analytics are already on it, every project gets a hard limit, and nothing is billed by usage.
$19 a month per box, plus about $10 for the server at Hetzner. Open source, so you can also run it yourself for free.