Mailpile

Mailpile
Original author(s)Bjarni Rúnar Einarsson, Brennan Novak, Smári McCarthy[1][2]
Developer(s)The Mailpile Team
Initial release13 September 2014; 10 years ago (2014-09-13)[3]
Stable release1.0.0rc6 (September 4, 2019; 5 years ago (2019-09-04)[4]) [±]
Repository
Written inPython
Operating systemLinux, macOS, Windows
PlatformWeb platform
Available inMore than 14 languages[5] Arabic (ar) Danish (da_DK) German (de) Greek (el_GR) Spanish (es_ES) French (fr_FR) Croatian (hr) Icelandic (is) Japanese (ja) Lithuanian (lt) Norwegian Bokmål (nb_NO) Dutch (nl_BE) Dutch (nl_NL) Polish (pl) Portuguese (pt_BR) Russian (ru_RU) Albanian (sq) Swedish (sv) Ukrainian (uk) Chinese (zh_CN)
TypeWebmail
License2015: AGPL-3.0-or-later[6]
2013: Dual-licensed[a]
2011: AGPL-3.0-or-later
WebsiteOfficial website Edit this at Wikidata

Mailpile is a free and open-source email client with the main focus of privacy and usability. It is a webmail 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.[7] Mailpile uses PGP 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 RAM 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.[8]

History

Mailpile started out as a search engine in 2011.[1]

Crowdfunding

The project gained recognition following an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign, raising $163,192 between August and September 2013.[9][10] In the middle of the campaign, PayPal froze a large portion of the raised funds, and subsequently released them after Mailpile took the issue to the public on blogs and social media platforms including Twitter.[11][12]

Releases

Alpha

The first publicly tagged release 0.1.0[13] from January 2014 included an original typeface (also by the name of "Mailpile"), UI feedback of encryption and signatures, custom search engine, integrated spam-filtering support, and localization to around 30 languages.[14]

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.[15]

Beta

Mailpile released a beta version in September 2014.[16][17]

Beta II

January 2015 1024 bit keys were no longer being generated, in favour of stronger, 4096 bit PGP keys.[18]

Beta III

July 2015[19]

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.[20]

Notes

  1. ^ AGPL-3.0-or-later or Apache-2.0+

References

  1. ^ Finley, Klint (August 26, 2013). "Open Sourcers Pitch Secure Email in Dark Age of PRISM". Wired. Retrieved March 8, 2014.
  2. ^ "Mailpile.is". Mailpile Team. Retrieved 2014-02-21.
  3. ^ Mailpile Team (13 September 2014). "One Year Later: Mailpile Beta". Mailpile Blog. Retrieved 29 September 2014.
  4. ^ "Releases - mailpile/Mailpile". Retrieved 29 June 2020 – via GitHub.
  5. ^ "Mailpile translation statistics". mailpile.is. 1 September 2014. Retrieved 2014-09-13.
  6. ^ "Licensing AGPLv3". GitHub. Retrieved 8 September 2015.
  7. ^ Finley, Klint (3 September 2014). "The Open Source Tool That Lets You Send Encrypted Emails to Anyone". Wired. Retrieved 29 September 2014.
  8. ^ A very uninformative progress update: Mailpile 2?
  9. ^ Lomas, Natasha (20 August 2013). "Mailpile Is A Pro-Privacy, Open Source Webmail Project That's Raised ~$100,000 On Indiegogo". TechCrunch. Retrieved 29 September 2014.
  10. ^ "Mailpile - taking e-mail back". IndieGoGo. Retrieved 29 September 2014.
  11. ^ Hutchinson, Lee (5 September 2013). "PayPal freezes $45,000 of Mailpile's crowdfunded dollars". ArsTechnica. Retrieved 29 September 2014.
  12. ^ Masnick, Mike (5 September 2013). "Insanity: PayPal Freezes Mailpile's Account, Demands Excessive Info To Get Access". TechDirt. Retrieved 29 September 2014.
  13. ^ Release Notes 201401 Alpha, GitHub, 1 February 2014
  14. ^ Mailpile Team (1 February 2014). "Alpha Release: Shipping Bits and Atoms". Mailpile Blog. Retrieved 21 February 2014.
  15. ^ Release Notes 201406 Alpha II, GitHub, 3 July 2014
  16. ^ Release Notes 201409 Beta, GitHub, 30 September 2014
  17. ^ Hutchinson, Lee (15 September 2014). "Mailpile enters beta—It's like Gmail, but you run it on your own computer". Ars Technica. Retrieved 29 September 2014.
  18. ^ Release Notes 201501 Beta II, GitHub, 20 January 2015
  19. ^ Release Notes 201507 Beta III, GitHub, 2 May 2017
  20. ^ Bjarni Rúnar: Mailpile: Still Hacking Anyway, mailpile : blog, 13 August 2017