Mailpile is a

free and open-source Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...

email client An email client, email reader or, more formally, message user agent (MUA) or mail user agent is a computer program used to access and manage a user's email. A web application which provides message management, composition, and reception functio ...

with the main focus of privacy and usability. It is a

webmail Webmail (or web-based email) is an email service that can be accessed using a standard web browser. It contrasts with email service accessible through a specialised email client software. Examples of webmail providers are 1&1 Ionos, AOL Mail, G ...

client, albeit one run from the user's computer, as a downloaded program launched as a local website.

Features

In the default setup of the program, the user is given a public and a private PGP key, for the purpose of (respectively) receiving encrypted email and then decrypting it. Mailpile uses

PGP PGP or Pgp may refer to: Science and technology * P-glycoprotein, a type of protein * Pelvic girdle pain, a pregnancy discomfort * Personal Genome Project, to sequence genomes and medical records * Pretty Good Privacy, a computer program for the ...

and stores all locally generated files in encrypted form on-disk. The client takes an opportunistic approach to finding other users to encrypt to, those that support it, and integrates this in the process of sending email. The program preloads a lot of email data into

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to accelerate search results. While the search results remain really fast despite large amounts of emails, this gradually slows down the start-up time of the program as stored email data increases. This feature will likely be altered in the planned Mailpile version 2.

History

Mailpile started out as a search engine in 201

Crowdfunding

The project gained recognition following an Indiegogo

crowdfunding Crowdfunding is the practice of funding a project or venture by raising money from a large number of people, typically via the internet. Crowdfunding is a form of crowdsourcing and alternative finance. In 2015, over was raised worldwide by crow ...

campaign, raising $163,192 between August and September 2013. In the middle of the campaign,

PayPal PayPal Holdings, Inc. is an American multinational financial technology company operating an online payments system in the majority of countries that support online money transfers, and serves as an electronic alternative to traditional paper ...

froze a large portion of the raised funds, and subsequently released them after Mailpile took the issue to the public on

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and social media platforms including

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

Releases

Alpha

The first publicly tagged release 0.1.0 from January 2014 included an original typeface (also by the name of "Mailpile"), UI feedback of encryption and signatures, custom search engine, integrated

spam Spam may refer to: * Spam (food), a canned pork meat product * Spamming, unsolicited or undesired electronic messages ** Email spam, unsolicited, undesired, or illegal email messages ** Messaging spam, spam targeting users of instant messaging ( ...

-filtering support, and localization to around 30 languages.

Alpha II

July 2014 This release introduced storing logs encrypted, partial native IMAP support, and the spam filtering engine gained more ways to auto-classify e-mail. The graphical interface was revamped. A wizard was introduced to help users with account setup.

Beta

Mailpile released a beta version in September 2014.

Beta II

January 2015 1024 bit keys were no longer being generated, in favour of stronger, 4096 bit PGP keys.

Beta III

July 2015

Release Candidate

A preliminary version of the 1.0 version was released on 13 August at the Dutch SHA2017 Hacker Camp, where the main developer gave a talk about the project.Bjarni Rúnar
Mailpile: Still Hacking Anyway
mailpile : blog, 13 August 2017

Notes

References

External links

* {{E-mail clients Email clients Free software programmed in Python Software using the GNU AGPL license Software using the Apache license MacOS email clients Email client software for Linux Windows email clients Free software webmail Tor onion services