Hister – private, self hosted search engine

Re:Hister – private, self hosted search engine by vzaliva on Saturday August 22, 2026 @05:40PM (#49404136)

I was thinking about making a "personal data search engine". I have almost 30GB of email archives and a bunch of Google Drive and offline files. I am thinking about downloading it all from the cloud and storing it on a large RAID array, with an indexing and search interface (and possibly a local MCP server).

Would Hister be suitable for this? Can it index mbox files? Would it handle this amount of data? Does it have a search API so I can build an MCP server?

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Re:Hister – private, self hosted search engine by asciimoo on Saturday August 22, 2026 @06:27PM (#49404467)

> Would Hister be suitable for this?

The indexer it uses (Bleve) can handle millions of records according to their docs, but sure that Hister would be the best choice for this task. I'd probably use Meilisearch (https://www.meilisearch.com/).

> Can it index mbox files?

Not yet.

> Does it have a search API so I can build an MCP server?

It has both search API and MCP server endpoints.

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Re:Hister – private, self hosted search engine by asciimoo on Sunday August 23, 2026 @09:40AM (#49408793)

EDIT: I wanted to write "*not* sure" in the previous message.

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Re:Hister – private, self hosted search engine by alchemist1e9 on Monday August 24, 2026 @07:50AM (#49418398)

Take a look at msgvault. It might handle your email archives very well.

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