15 ms·

Mailpile: Let’s take email back

520 points by threedaymonk 13y ago

jokull 13y ago
This project has roots at least some years back, so it’s not starting from scratch with lofty ideas that are unlikely to come to fruition. Solid team with a great ideology!
HerraBRE 13y ago
Bjarni here, lead dev. Happy to answer any questions.
- jeffbr13 13y ago
  Are there any plans to help make setting up your own mailserver easier? That seems to be the main challenge for anyone who wants to self-host right now.
  - HerraBRE 13y ago
    That is one of our main long-term goals. It's too early to say exactly how we would do that, but odds are there would be some sort of helper service in the cloud which relays and handles DNS and such. We need to get the client built first though.
    - jeffbr13 13y ago
      And what would be your approach to spam-filtering? One of Google Mail's strengths is that it can use data from millions of accounts' emails to train its spam-filter. Do you see Mailpile offering some way to do the same thing in the future, with clients flagging spam and the result being used to train a 'community' filter?
      - HerraBRE 13y ago
        This is still largely an open question. But there are some interesting possibilities for those who actually make their Mailpile visible on the public web - Mailpiles could talk to each other and exchange data of this sort. But ideally things like this would be a community effort shared between projects and we would join, not necessarily lead.
        alextingle 13y ago
        If encrypted & signed mail becomes common enough, then I suspect the spam problem goes away. I suspect spammers won't want to sign their mail, and if they do, it would be trivial to distrust new public keys and maintain a global blacklist of bad established ones. Then almost all encrypted mail can be simply trusted, and spam filtering only has to pick out the occasional real message from the unencrypted dross.
- joeyh 13y ago
  Please fix the "it's" typo on your website ;)
  - HerraBRE 13y ago
    Haha, noted. Thanks.
- ssp 13y ago
  Do you have plans to make money off of this?
  - M4v3R 13y ago
    They've started an indiegogo campaign to fund the development. http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/mailpile-taking-e-mail-back http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/mailpile-taking-e-mail-bac...
- andrewcooke 13y ago
  how does the search work? is there a separate database? i use mairix (which does construct a separate database) and it's pretty damn awesome. have you looked at that? are re-inventing something worse? sometimes it is useful to search just the body. and mairix works fine with a huge volume of mail. also, getmail is python and does pop and imap downloads, so could be used there. [otherwise, this seems awesome and if i run out of my own dumb ideas i will seriously consider contributing]
  - HerraBRE 13y ago
    It is a custom search engine, written in Python. It works surprisingly well, most queries are answered under 200ms and tens of milliseconds are common once caches are warm.
    - beachstartup 13y ago
      any plans for a solr support? there's a lot of knowledge out there on how to scale solr for large webmail deployments like i.e. inside a large company or for forensic mail analysis.
      - rhizome31 13y ago
        I was wondering about that as well. Why not go with an existing search engine? Having checked out the code it seems that the project it still in its infancy. A lot of effort has probably gone into building the search engine though, which kind of seem like re-inventing the wheel but I'm sure you have reasons that I don't see. By the way, as test-infected coder, my first move was to launch the test suite, and it was a bit surprising that it wanted to run sudo :) I didn't go further for now because I don't have time to setup fetchmail, will do later. You guys seem to have a lot of potential and good intentions :) In my end of the world I'm also dreaming of "taking back email" and I happen to write Python for a living, so I'll be watching you guys very closely. Quite frankly though, I won't consider contributing until you have a proper test suite :) Keep it up!
        13y ago
- susi22 13y ago
  Not a question but a comment: You should add an igg link to the github README. Some people link to github projects instead of the website. Good luck!
  - gingerlime 13y ago
    What's an "igg link"?
    - mikkow 13y ago
      Indiegogo link
  - HerraBRE 13y ago
    Yes, very good point. :)
- mkl 13y ago
  "Mailpile is a modern web-mail you run on your own computer." I think this sentence should be the first thing anyone sees when they go to the page. The text at the moment assumes everyone already knows roughly what Mailpile is, so I didn't figure it out until I read HN comments. Also, are there screenshots somewhere?
  - HerraBRE 13y ago
    Brennan was working on getting some screenshots uploaded. We are obviously very busy reloading everything at the moment. ;-)
  - jspaetzel 13y ago
    I think that this sentence needs to be gotten rid of completely. - Webmail is fundamentally not something that can run on your own computer. The word is "web" mail, not desktop mail, it's just going to confuse users. In addition to it being confusing, because of dynamic IPs and residential port blocking you may be able to run it on your computer, you just won't be able to do anything with it due to other internet infrastructure... - Sending mail from home is almost guaranteed to fail sometimes/often, due to dynamic ip ranges which are frequently blocked. - Port 25 and port 80 are blocked by most major american ISPs these days for residential services. Making this unusable from a home server. Not to mention it's against many ISPs terms of service to run a server from home without paying for a business package. (That's right, it's not just google fibre) - SPF records and other forms of email authentication? You would also need a third party DDNS service if using a dynamic IP. So with all of that said, I like the interface pictures. It could be a good competitor to webmail clients like roundcube and friends.
    - alextingle 13y ago
      > Sending mail from home is almost guaranteed to fail... It's an MUA - it can sent mail just as well as any other MUA. Use your ISP's smarthost if you are using it from home. > Webmail is fundamentally not something that can run on your own computer. This statement is plain wrong, even if by "your own computer" you really mean "your desktop box". I can run any server I like on my desktop box. If it has a well designed installer, then it would be as easy to set up as a "normal" app - the end user might not ever know the technical details. > The word is "web" mail, not desktop mail, it's just going to confuse users. Now I do agree with you. The product seems to be a little bit of both, so there is some potential for confusion. "Web-mail you run on your own computer" does seem to explain it pretty well though.
- guygurari 13y ago
  I applaud your efforts! I did not see mobile mentioned. Will there be a mobile-friendly version of the web client? Will there be IMAP access from (e.g.) mobile devices? (Under 'Current Features' you mention IMAP, but I did not understand if this refers to you acting as an IMAP client or server.) By the way, there seems to be a copy-paste typo in the description for 'Spam Detection'; it reads 'PGP encryption and verification of emails and recipients'.
  - HerraBRE 13y ago
    Yes, making the web mobile friendly is definitely on the list of things to do. Native apps may come later, once the APIs have stabalized a bit. The current IMAP support is functioning as an IMAP client, we haven't started work on the server side yet. And thanks for the typo report :)
    - alternize 13y ago
      so if i understand you comment right: it will be a MUA that accessed through a webbrowser, and one still needs to have an IMAP capable email-account somewhere else?
      - HerraBRE 13y ago
        Yes, at least to begin with, we are not providing people with domains or e-mail addresses. IMAP, POP3, or run your own SMTP server...
        alternize 13y ago
        but then I'm not really seeing what the advantagess over running thunderbird + engimail locally or using roundcube (which also has openpgp support built in) would be?
        unhammer 13y ago
        sigh … I already have email clients that do PGP on my email that is hosted on Someone Else's Computer. It doesn't seem like Mailpile moves me a single step away from the dragnet. When I saw the "pagekite" username on github, I immediately hoped for plug-and-play self-hosted IMAP/SMTP. Here is what I envisioned in the blissfully ignorant moments until I read what the project was actually about: The user gets to download/buy a USB stick image / raspberry pi SD image. After plugging it into a pi or other box and turning that on, user types in the URL "mailpile" on their laptop web browser and on first run, user gets asked by web app to plug in a big harddrive for storing email on[1]. The box runs some IMAP server (dovecot?), connected to some MTA that does TLS (postfix?). The user has paid for an already setup domain name, kept in sync with the IP address of that box (which runs a dyndns-like daemon), user also gets access to some server that relays SMTP without breaking TLS (since most mail servers will not accept SMTP from just any dynamic IP). So on first run, the user also has to enter the credentials for the service they paid for, these credentials are used to let the box get its SSL key signed by the CA, tell the dyndns service that this box gets to update this domain name etc. Now if two users run this, they don't even need PGP to communicate in an encrypted way, it looks just like any other sent email. Nor can anyone requisition their mail without breaking into their house. So the paid service would be to get a dyndns-updatable domain name with SSL, and access to some server that relays SMTP. The service would have to dole out domain names and either be a CA itself, or be able to intermediate in the SSL key signing process. [1] For bonus points, dejadup runs there and user gets to say "send encrypted backups to dropbox/some ssh account/some other USB drive"
- eps 13y ago
  > Smári is the director if the International Modern Media Institute of
- ippisl 13y ago
  What about anonymity ? email has a potential for better anonymity than TOR via mixmaster or other remailers. Are you considering those features ?
  - HerraBRE 13y ago
    It's not on the roadmap yet, but that is why we want to build a community, to see what people want.
- barend 13y ago
  Your introductory text and video mention the NSA and PGP. The PGP system has been around for a long time without getting any mainstream traction. There are numerous reasons for this failure, but the general complexity of public key crypto has to be one of them. On the project page you write > An intuitive, modern user interface makes strong security accessible to everyone. Can you share a bit more about the way you envision this?
  - HerraBRE 13y ago
    Big, big topic. I suggest you follow our Twitter account or something, we'll probably be blogging about this later on in the campaign.
- alecco 13y ago
  Thank you! will donate today. What about perfect forward secrecy for server connections? What about transparent text compression?
  - HerraBRE 13y ago
    Sounds like those are out of scope, that's just down to correctly configuring the SSL server. But yeah, I hope we correctly configure our SSL servers. ;-)
- rhizome31 13y ago
  Why AGPL rather than a more liberal license like BSD or MIT? Edit: Just to clarify why I'm asking this, the project looks very interesting and I suppose the choice of AGPL wasn't made lightly, as it might slow down adoption by commercial organizations, so I'm interested in the reasoning behind this choice.
  - HerraBRE 13y ago
    This is something we have debated extensively. Our main goal is to improve privacy and security on-line - giving cloud providers yet another free tool with which to build proprietary services and lock in more users and their data feels like it would be counterproductive. However, we are open to discussing, and if a significant fraction of our backers would prefer a more liberal license we will probably switch.
    - alecco 13y ago
      Please stay AGPL. It's the right choice for these times. BTW, beware of code ownership of pull requests from corporations.
      - pixelcort 13y ago
        Regarding Pull Requests, this is quite important if and when you want to change licenses, or dual license. Make sure you have on file release forms for every copyright holder who submits code that grant you permission to relicense later on. For one line bug fixes it can be a pain, but it's worth it. One problem with this though is that it places an unfair advantage with the current maintainer. A fork of the project wouldn't inherit the relicensing permissions from all the contributors.
        icebraining 13y ago
        Ugh, why? You're just discouraging people from contributing by forcing them to accept that their code might be used in a matter they don't approve of in the future.
- jerrac 13y ago
  Any plans for .deb/.rpm repositories?
  - HerraBRE 13y ago
    Of course, but that's months away. We gotta write the software first!
    - jerrac 13y ago
      'Course it's months away. :) I've noticed that some applications don't offer their own repositories. So I've been left with either relying on the distributions out of date packages, or installing the application manually. That's why I asked. I'd rather use your repos so that I can keep it up to date.
      - tmzt 13y ago
        Another option is packaging it with docker (http://docker.io http://docker.io) so it could be dropped onto an existing system quickly.
jeffbr13 13y ago
I'm super-happy that someone is at last trying to build a self-hosted competitor to Gmail. Sure, I can set up my own mailserver already, but the amount of effort it takes is too much compared to just setting up a Gmail account. If they can get set-up and spam-protection right, then this could be huge!
- StavrosK 13y ago
  Bonus points for it being installable with one "docker build" command. I would definitely give it a shot, at the very least.
ghshephard 13y ago
I like the concept - but it's missing a discussion of how they handle what I consider to be (by a pretty large factor) one of the most important feature in email - Anti-Spam. Gmail (which I'm not suggesting is an ideal, just what I happen to use) doesn't even bother to show me my spam folder - and, in the last week, it's redirected 1178 messages there.
- HerraBRE 13y ago
  Absolutely. I'm the lead developer - I spent almost 6 years working on anti-virus and anti-spam, so rest assured we know this is a big deal. :-) There is alot of quality stuff in the open source world already which we will be able to build on. Update: To clarify why we left it out of the pitch - we just took it for granted that you can't have a functional e-mail client without dealing with spam.
  - eps 13y ago
    You should clarify it for sure. This is really important and it's hard to do properly.
  - anentropic 13y ago
    Nothing I tried ever handled spam as well as Gmail, I was drowning in it, it's the number one reason I use Gmail. I see so little spam now I think if everyone used Gmail the spammers would have to give up. There are plenty of nice-enough webmail UIs around, and people complain about the speed of Gmail but I find it perfectly fine. Spam's the thing.
- Semaphor 13y ago
  I recently switched to fastmail.fm and I really can't complain about their spam filtering even though they are way smaller than gmail.
msvan 13y ago
It‘s still decidedly aimed at techies though. I guess it'll be another few years before the benefits of a Free Software Gmail competitor will be accessible to the layman.
- brennannovak 13y ago
  Hi there. I'm the UI/UX designer on the Mailpile team. Making every aspect of MP easy for non-techies is my primary concern. We aim to be easier than Wordpress with our Alpha release in Jan 2014. Please give me any feedback concerns with out to achieve this goal :)
  - WayneDB 13y ago
    Feedback: IMAP and POP3 would let everyone continue to use the native apps that they know and love for their UX. The web sucks for apps. It just does. Making robust dedicated native apps for each major platform would be a real differentiator.
    - brennannovak 13y ago
      Thanks for your feedback! We definitely would like to build native (mobile) apps for Mailpile- small (and important) steps, first though :)
petercooper 13y ago
Weird that the description of what it actually is is below the fold :-) However: Mailpile is a modern web-mail you run on your own computer.
marquis 13y ago
I applaud these goals however if we were to ever consider moving from Google Apps (which we would) it would only be for an open source project given that privacy is becoming the more critical issue as the years go on. It would be great to see a subscription based email service such as this where the source is fully available for scrutinizing and patching. Edit: Great, so the source is already available.
- deleted 13y ago
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- marcosdumay 13y ago
  This is an open source project. Also, if privacy is important for you, you shouldn't look into subscription services, whatever software package they use.
  - marquis 13y ago
    That's fantastic. I didn't see any information about this on your page so you might want to make this clearer (I assure you I read it first before commenting, then went back and saw the Fork on Github ribbon, the only indication). By subscription I mean that I am happy to support an open source project with regular funding. Initial funds from Indiegogo are not sufficient to maintain a long-term service and we'd be hesitant to move our most important business infrastructure to something that may not be updated regularly as the security environment changes. If you were to look into making this a business with recurring revenue I believe you would find there is a lot of support.
    - andrewcooke 13y ago
      there's a big red line across the top right corner pointing to github (and licencing info there). there's another link to github near the end. apologies for a previous post that used strong language, but you really can't have looked very hard. (you know, i just read chapter 2 of 'how to win friends and influence people' which tells me that criticising people never works because they simply work harder to justify themselves. it's the most depressing thing i have read in a long time, but it seems to be horribly, universally true. and it's so frustrating when the world seems to be populated by incompetent idiots. how do you convince someone 'nicely' that they complained about something without even reading it?)
AxisOfEval 13y ago
Noble goals. With all the NSA action, this is something whose time has come. Where do I donate?
- vidar 13y ago
  http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/mailpile-taking-e-mail-back http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/mailpile-taking-e-mail-bac...
- rocky1138 13y ago
  I get what you're saying, but what's to stop them from monitoring the transmission and how can you be sure the receiver of your sent email is running a secure email as well? I don't think this does much to stop snooping.
  - takluyver 13y ago
    It doesn't guarantee that any specific e-mail is snooping-proof, but it makes it hard for someone to trivially look through all your e-mails from the last five years.
rufugee 13y ago
I just switched back to Zimbra (also open source) after years with Google Apps. It's been a spectacular experience so far, and it's nice to have email fell like email again (not to mention being in full control).. It has everything I need: a rich web client, good smartphone phone support, good spam filtering, and a good community.
- 1O0101ll100O 13y ago
  Another vote for Zimbra. Seriously, it's not that hard to install and setup. Once you have it all going the capabilities are immense. It also lives on your machine, using your SSL certs, and using as much in-place HDD encryption as you want. This is how you take your privacy back. You care enough about it to do it yourself.
  - cromwellian 13y ago
    It's also how you give yourself a headache having to sysadmin a machine. I myself used to run Zimbra and switched to Google Apps. Too much irritation with backups, monitoring, security, et al.
- Nux 13y ago
  +1 for Zimbra as well, is a very nice Exchange replacement! Having said that, Zimbra was just acquired recently (yes, AGAIN) and this fact makes me nervous, not sure whether to despair or rejoice.[1] Mailpipe, if it ever happens, should help a lot getting some of that mail from the claws of Gmail and the likes. They can have my money. [1] - https://blog.zimbra.com/blog/archives/2013/07/telligent-acquires-zimbra-from-vmware.html https://blog.zimbra.com/blog/archives/2013/07/telligent-acqu...
rufugee 13y ago
I just switched back to Zimbra (also open source) after years with Google Apps. It's been a spectacular experience so far, and it's nice to have email fell like email again (not to mention being in full control).. It has everything I need: a rich web client, good smartphone phone support, good spam filtering, and a good community.
deleted 13y ago
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tebeka 13y ago
Two things: 1. IMO sup (http://supmua.org/ http://supmua.org/) is more mature and does about the same. However it's interface is a curses based one which is a plus and a minus. 2. Why not use an existing search products (like xapian)?
- HerraBRE 13y ago
  This is actually answered in the FAQ on our Indiegogo campaign: http://igg.me/at/mailpile http://igg.me/at/mailpile Mostly, the reason we do things the way we do, is because one of our primary goals is to make an end-user desktop app. Packaging is therefore a significant task and minimizing dependencies will help a lot. We still have quite a bit of work to do on our website and message.
- stevekemp 13y ago
  One of the reasons I started lumail (http://lumail.org/ http://lumail.org/) was because none of the existing console clients worked for me. Specifically sup will die importing my 2013-1994 = 19 year mail archive.
TomAnthony 13y ago
This looks great! I have a couple of questions: - Any plans for a plugin/extension system? - Are there any screenshots of the interface anywhere? Thanks! : )
- barend 13y ago
  The landing page mentions plugins. There are screenshots in the video, although I don't know whether these are concepts or existent.
- falk 13y ago
  At around 1:30 in their Indiegogo video they show what I assume is the user-interface of the app. Looks nice. http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/mailpile-taking-e-mail-back http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/mailpile-taking-e-mail-bac...
beachstartup 13y ago
if you need free site hosting PM me. i run an infrastructure company and are looking to support open source projects (we rely heavily upon open source).
rpdillon 13y ago
This is exactly what I've been looking for! It seems the product is aimed at technical users (at least initially), though there are some technical details I didn't see in the video, description or FAQ: - This is an MUA, correct? Based on the features on the project page, it sounds like MailPile will not act as an MTA or MDA, and is predominantly interfacing with mbox/maildir. I see features for IMAP and POP3 on the roadmap, but its not clear if using those protocols is idiomatic for MailPile. - How is PGP/GPG handled? The server-side code for MailPile must have access to my secret key, correct? Is MailPile's web interface then accessible via HTTPS (given the proper cert)? - Is there a plan for a key management interface? - It sounds like the MUA itself (MailPile) is a server, and it would access maildir/mbox directly. Is there any API planned for accessing that data through MailPile's programatically, or is MailPile's main goal to provide a browser interface? - This might have been covered, but will the web interface support mobile as well? Thanks for working on this...it really sounds like a great project!
- aet 13y ago
  Also check lavabit.com
- HerraBRE 13y ago
  Thanks! The idea is you run Mailpile on a machine you control (it is an MUA), either your laptop (and connect to localhost) or a home server like a plug computer or something like that - basically somewhere where you feel comfortable storing your secret keys. And yes, API access to mail is something we already support, every "command" can return either HTML, plain text or JSON. Probably XML to come as well. We'll have to help with key management, otherwise it won't be usable by normal folks. Mobile web support, yes, probably sooner than later. Hope this clarifies!
  - rsync 13y ago
    Yes, this is also something I very much want. I personally use (al)pine over SSH, so I don't need this ... my email is already on my own mailserver and I already access it over a secure channel, etc. But my wife ... she's not going to put up with pine. So then I run a pop daemon. And she pops from gmail. And her email is in third party hands, etc. If there were a decent web mail client, I could turn off popd, one less open port, and access only over SSL. Which I would hide with port-knocking, of course. I can teach her port-knocking, right ?
arcameron 13y ago
Hi guys, If you're interested in this, you might also want to check out: https://echoplex.us https://echoplex.us (overview) https://chat.echoplex.us https://chat.echoplex.us (in action) https://github.com/qq99/echoplexus https://github.com/qq99/echoplexus (github) Lead developer here, FYI
johnchristopher 13y ago
Nitpicking: Thumbnails shouldn't be high-res pictures that actually are scaled to stamp proportions. It's slow to appear on poor connection and for a moment I thought there were no screenshots and just words like "compose". And it slows down my poor 2nd gen asus notebook.
nhangen 13y ago
I'm in the crowdfunding business, so I feel strange saying this, but I'm really turned off by this model of 'pay us in advance for developing a product that hasn't been market tested or validated,' especially when asking for a sum as large as is $100,000. What happened to building something and selling it? According to the campaign page, the need is so great because: "We're asking for a lot of money, so of course you should know why. $100.000 means paying two people $4166 a month for a year, including all taxes, insurance and other fees." I suppose people get what they pay for, but I find it insulting to ask me to pay your salary for a year so that you can avoid risk. If you were truly concerned about online privacy, you'd build it anyway. So is privacy the mission, or the pitch?
- tstrimple 13y ago
  I see it as a form of customer development. The days of building something and hoping people like it when you're done should be over. If they can generate enough interest to support the development they know they are working on a product that people are interested in and will actually pay them for.
- ptype 13y ago
  Actually, I don't think they are looking to build a business out of this? From the web site: "This is the Mailpile business model. As long as members of our community are willing to fund development (we will ask you to renew your membership in a years' time), we will dedicate ourselves to Mailpile and build the secure web-mail client you want."
  - ChuckMcM 13y ago
    This and the parent combined are the interesting bit. So this is exactly the Richard Stallman model of software. Pay people to develop it, don't charge anything for the software and give away the source. There is no economic incentive for the donors (they might get a mail program, might not, but they will never get their money back or a return on that money.) I suppose rms originally imagined that someone like the mailpile people would take the money they were given to create mailpile and give it to some other developer to create the tools they need. However, as we see in this campaign, all the money they get will go toward feeding, housing, and insuring themselves. (wait till they learn about payroll taxes, that will make them fiscal conservatives in a hurry :-) Like the parent comment I can see how this works in the "old" world (make a company, product, sell it, rinse and repeat) but am curious to see if it can work in this other way.
srid68 13y ago
It is very good you are attacking this problem, but is this the right way to attack the email problem? According to Paul Graham frightening startup ideas http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html, email is a bad ToDo list, How are you going to implement a better Todo list? I have created a alpha prototype which attacks these problems conceptually, namely, Message Classification, Message Sharing, Bidirectional Messaging, Pull Messaging, Sender Revocation, Message Expiry, Centralized Attachment etc as a Mobile App but approached this as a separate todo protocol using the Push Messaging Infrastructure. You can download the working app from Google Play https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=priya.pullgrid.v1 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=priya.pullgrid... and can see a website created http://www.pullworld.com http://www.pullworld.com (Undocumented - You can download the Frontend App Html Source - Have not even shared in HN as Show HN because it is incomplete in documentation). The purpose of the Prototype is just as a proof of concept and not really to solve the email problem. I would love to share my knowledge/architecture if you are interested, so that you can really attack this problem as envisaged by pg and since you are planning to do it open source and with email, would love to contribute if you are thinking of mobile in the future using Html/OpenGL based client.
- gcr 13y ago
  I'm not sure about that idea. A tongue-in-cheek evaluation: http://pastebin.com/Xf1RffNV http://pastebin.com/Xf1RffNV
- TimPC 13y ago
  I think mailbox solves the to-do list problem well enough that it's hard to catch them on that dimension. On the other hnad, there are plenty of new thorny security issues that can generate popular interest. Running a crowd-funder is a good way of proving a market.
lnanek2 13y ago
Thumbnail images under the interface section are coming up broken.
didip 13y ago
It uses CGI eh? Old school, I like it! * It's a bit hard to find where the HTML/JS templates are. I think that's important for folks who are good at design and willing to help the project. * search.py, looks like it stores indexes in memory, is that correct? Will it work if I run multiple instances of httpd?
mikaelf 13y ago
You have got to get rid of that logo.
- brennannovak 13y ago
  Mailpile UI/UX designer here- thanks for the "feedback" I guess... What bothers you about our current logo, specifically?
schabernakk 13y ago
this looks awesome, lots of luck. Am I understanding this correctly that this is basically a selfhosted imap/pop/smtp frontend? I am curious how you guys would use it, i.e. where would you actually host your emails? Running your own mailserver on a vserver sounds fun and not to expensive but I don't know if I want to maintain something like that in the long run. If something breaks this just sounds like a lot of work. You guys pay for mail hosting? Use the one that comes with your website domain?
MrGando 13y ago
Prime member... hope this project goes through.
deleted 13y ago
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oakaz 13y ago
We all need to back this project to get rid of the monopoly of Google.
- icebraining 13y ago
  Google doesn't have anywhere near a monopoly on Email. They are barely ahead their two largest competitors.
  - oakaz 13y ago
    and what planet do you live in? everybody I know has a Google account only because of either Gmail or Youtube.
    - icebraining 13y ago
      I live on the planet not defined only by your personal experiences.
      - oakaz 13y ago
        Ok then go research how many companies in silicon valley give their employees Gmail. All the companies I've been worked provided Gmail only because there is really not a good open source option. And Google accounts is a huge monopoly that obviously sounds bad enough to hurt your feelings. But this is the reality. Google is a valley of shit and most of us want to move on from it.
        icebraining 13y ago
        Criticizing Google doesn't "hurt my feeling". I've moved away from Gmail and other Google services (not all) a few years ago because I disagreed with their options. But that doesn't mean I have to agree with nonsensical claims such as Google having a monopoly on email. Maybe they do on Silicon Valley, but I'm sure you realize that's a pretty insignificant subset of email users.
znowi 13y ago
Very timely. Might be a viable alternative to NSA's Gmail. The tech lead is from the Empire though - an ex-Googler - not exactly a privacy caring company :) Maybe that's why he left :)
gcr 13y ago
How is this any different from every other desktop mail client (eg. Thunderbird, Inky, Evolution, Notmuch, Sup, Mutt, ...)? What makes this better?
- HerraBRE 13y ago
  This is a desktop mail client. It is also a web-mail you can run on a server somewhere if you so choose. It depends on how it is deployed. Contrasting Mailpile with other tools, one difference is that the basic design is that of a search engine, not a tool for reading mail from folders. Most current desktop mail clients are built on top of a bad paradigm, in my opinion. Another exciting thing about this model, is that since the UI is a website (of sorts), we can leverage the collective experience and creativity of the web design community. That is a much, much larger pool of talent than UI designers who know C++ or Objective C, or whatever. Finally, making the app a web server means you get an API to interact with your e-mail almost for free.
  - stevekemp 13y ago
    I've been working on an extensible console-based mail-client for the past while. (http://lumail.org/ http://lumail.org/) I abhor the idea that clients only ever interact with messages from a single folder.
- Freaky 13y ago
  notmuch isn't really a client so much as a backend. A better question might be why this isn't using/building upon it.
  - gcr 13y ago
    To clarify, Notmuch is a mail indexing and search system with a command-line/library API. It's very easy to integrate with mail frontends because of good design decisions (eg. it does very little, everything can spit out JSON for easy parsing, ...). As a result, many excellent frontend clients were written on top of it (an emacs mode that I use, a Mutt/Sup-like curses client, a GTK one, ...) Notmuch does two things: - Indexes a Maildir and places messages into a Xapian fulltext database. - Provides an API for tagging, threading, retrieving, searching, creating template replies, etc. for the messages in its index. Getting mail into the folder is the burden of another program (say offlineimap or getmail), and sending mail is also handled by other tools (say MSMTP or sendmail). I think Notmuch would have made an absolutely killer framework to base Mailpile off of.
sorbits 13y ago
They talk about privacy, but MTAs like Postfix can already encrypt mail via TLS when moving it to another host¹. GPG gives us a better guarantee, but more user overhead, and unreadable by many recipients. Additionally SPF gives us a way to check if the sender address has been forged. GPG signing is more robust, but again, more user overhead. Not to mention, I already have S/MIME support in my mail application and can get GPG support via a plug-in, but I use neither, because few recipients can handle it. So what is new with Mailpile? What is it supposed to change? In my opinion, if the goal is to make email more secure, we should look into ensuring that all MTAs is setup to support TLS and use it when delivering mail to other hosts (AFAIK Exim4 only announces STARTTLS when connecting to its submission port). Getting SPF records setup would also be a plus. This would go a long way in making email more secure, and only requires action from administrators of mail domains. ¹ http://www.postfix.org/postconf.5.html#smtp_tls_security_level http://www.postfix.org/postconf.5.html#smtp_tls_security_lev...
- alextingle 13y ago
  Exim can announce TLS to all comers. Set the tls_advertise_hosts option to '*'. (I believe Debian sets this by default.) http://www.exim.org/exim-html-current/doc/html/spec_html/ch-encrypted_smtp_connections_using_tlsssl.html http://www.exim.org/exim-html-current/doc/html/spec_html/ch-...
javascriptgod 13y ago
not another shitty mail service
- brennannovak 13y ago
  Wow, that's a useful comment. Thanks.
ivanbrussik 13y ago
i like it, and im willing to pay $5. to make it happen
jccalhoun 13y ago
Who are we taking it back from?
- brennannovak 13y ago
  Firstly, the centralized cloud webmail companies (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo) by giving people the ability to self host their email with an awesome webmail solution! ~Mailpile Designer
chrischen 13y ago
I'm not sure what responsive framework you're using, but the layout doesn't look good and the logo is messed up on mobile browsers.
topherwhite 13y ago
Should they succeed, let us hope that the mobile version of the webmail client will function better than the mobile version of your static site. Pretty unusable in MobileSafari.
- brennannovak 13y ago
  Hey topherwhite I'm the UI/UX designer of Mailpile- totally aware of the poor rendering on mobile at present. Working on fixing that- was swamped with other aspects of the campaign launch. Thanks for your feedback :)
joshguthrie 13y ago
I don't get it, how is it better than RoundCube[0], Horde[1] or any other webmail clients? Out of the six "reasons", three of them are already there in the wild (privacy, self-host and no ads), I'm pretty sure two more can be found/coded (search & encryption) and the last one (speed) is completely subjective to one's usage. I mean seriously, what's the appeal to paying for Mailpile when I could just use an open-source webmail client on my server? (Which I will by the way, thanks for the idea) 0: http://roundcube.net/ http://roundcube.net/ 1: http://www.horde.org/apps/imp http://www.horde.org/apps/imp PS: Here are more: http://www.noupe.com/ajax/10-ajax-webmail-clients.html http://www.noupe.com/ajax/10-ajax-webmail-clients.html
weirdkid 13y ago
This reminds me of Zoe. http://zoe.sourceforge.net http://zoe.sourceforge.net Back in 2001 or 2002, I was following the progress of Zoe, what I thought to be a very promising new approach to email archives. It kept your email in mbox or eml files, used Lucene for indexing and search and then provided a web interface on an embedded web server. The Zoe project is no longer active (the homepage is dead and the files are gone), but this MailPile sounds very much like it. Almost exactly like it. I hope it does better.
ricardobeat 13y ago
This project desperately needs a logo.
VexXtreme 13y ago
I wonder how long until they put a NSA rootkit in it.
tambourine_man 13y ago
Site is barely readable on the iPhone: http://imgur.com/IbwipKQ.jpg http://imgur.com/IbwipKQ.jpg
- brennannovak 13y ago
  Thanks! I'm working on fixing mobile rendering ASAP :)
moxie 13y ago
Here's why I want something like Mailpile: Right now, every single email I receive is encrypted. I have my public GPG key on my mail server, and every incoming email that's not already encrypted is encrypted using that public key. That way if the anyone compels my VPS provider for access, they just get a bunch of encrypted email. So my problem isn't receiving or encrypting email, it's reading it. The only real option I have right now is Thunderbird, which isn't great, and is no longer under development. Mailpile doesn't look like a mail service to me, it looks like a browser-based but locally-hosted MUA, which might be the remedy to Thunderbird that we need.
Bjoern 13y ago
What is wrong with e.g. Dovecot/Postfix + Roundcube ? How would this be any better? Is this intended to be a "close as possible" gmail clone?
vickytnz 13y ago
Urrgh, if you're going to ask for money, at least ensure you use 'its' correctly on the fundraising button (i.e. it should be 'reach its fundraising goal'. I really wish everyone would read the Oatmeal piece on apostrophes http://theoatmeal.com/comics/apostrophe http://theoatmeal.com/comics/apostrophe
daurnimator 13y ago
Mailpile stores in RAM about 180 bytes of metadata per message (actual size depends largely on the size of various headers), but Python overhead brings that to about 250B. This means handling a million messages should consume about 250MB of RAM - not too bad if you consider how much memory your browser (or desktop e-mail client) eats up. Totally killed my interest, I want to run this on a small server (e.g. NAS), for everyone in my family

520 points by threedaymonk 13y ago

This project has roots at least some years back, so it’s not starting from scratch with lofty ideas that are unlikely to come to fruition. Solid team with a great ideology!

HerraBRE 13y ago

Bjarni here, lead dev. Happy to answer any questions.

jeffbr13 13y ago
Are there any plans to help make setting up your own mailserver easier? That seems to be the main challenge for anyone who wants to self-host right now.
- HerraBRE 13y ago
  That is one of our main long-term goals. It's too early to say exactly how we would do that, but odds are there would be some sort of helper service in the cloud which relays and handles DNS and such. We need to get the client built first though.
  - jeffbr13 13y ago
    And what would be your approach to spam-filtering? One of Google Mail's strengths is that it can use data from millions of accounts' emails to train its spam-filter. Do you see Mailpile offering some way to do the same thing in the future, with clients flagging spam and the result being used to train a 'community' filter?
    - HerraBRE 13y ago
      This is still largely an open question. But there are some interesting possibilities for those who actually make their Mailpile visible on the public web - Mailpiles could talk to each other and exchange data of this sort. But ideally things like this would be a community effort shared between projects and we would join, not necessarily lead.
      - alextingle 13y ago
        If encrypted & signed mail becomes common enough, then I suspect the spam problem goes away. I suspect spammers won't want to sign their mail, and if they do, it would be trivial to distrust new public keys and maintain a global blacklist of bad established ones. Then almost all encrypted mail can be simply trusted, and spam filtering only has to pick out the occasional real message from the unencrypted dross.
joeyh 13y ago
Please fix the "it's" typo on your website ;)
- HerraBRE 13y ago
  Haha, noted. Thanks.
ssp 13y ago
Do you have plans to make money off of this?
- M4v3R 13y ago
  They've started an indiegogo campaign to fund the development. http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/mailpile-taking-e-mail-back http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/mailpile-taking-e-mail-bac...
andrewcooke 13y ago
how does the search work? is there a separate database? i use mairix (which does construct a separate database) and it's pretty damn awesome. have you looked at that? are re-inventing something worse? sometimes it is useful to search just the body. and mairix works fine with a huge volume of mail. also, getmail is python and does pop and imap downloads, so could be used there. [otherwise, this seems awesome and if i run out of my own dumb ideas i will seriously consider contributing]
- HerraBRE 13y ago
  It is a custom search engine, written in Python. It works surprisingly well, most queries are answered under 200ms and tens of milliseconds are common once caches are warm.
  - beachstartup 13y ago
    any plans for a solr support? there's a lot of knowledge out there on how to scale solr for large webmail deployments like i.e. inside a large company or for forensic mail analysis.
    - rhizome31 13y ago
      I was wondering about that as well. Why not go with an existing search engine? Having checked out the code it seems that the project it still in its infancy. A lot of effort has probably gone into building the search engine though, which kind of seem like re-inventing the wheel but I'm sure you have reasons that I don't see. By the way, as test-infected coder, my first move was to launch the test suite, and it was a bit surprising that it wanted to run sudo :) I didn't go further for now because I don't have time to setup fetchmail, will do later. You guys seem to have a lot of potential and good intentions :) In my end of the world I'm also dreaming of "taking back email" and I happen to write Python for a living, so I'll be watching you guys very closely. Quite frankly though, I won't consider contributing until you have a proper test suite :) Keep it up!
      - 13y ago
susi22 13y ago
Not a question but a comment: You should add an igg link to the github README. Some people link to github projects instead of the website. Good luck!
- gingerlime 13y ago
  What's an "igg link"?
  - mikkow 13y ago
    Indiegogo link
- HerraBRE 13y ago
  Yes, very good point. :)
mkl 13y ago
"Mailpile is a modern web-mail you run on your own computer." I think this sentence should be the first thing anyone sees when they go to the page. The text at the moment assumes everyone already knows roughly what Mailpile is, so I didn't figure it out until I read HN comments. Also, are there screenshots somewhere?
- HerraBRE 13y ago
  Brennan was working on getting some screenshots uploaded. We are obviously very busy reloading everything at the moment. ;-)
- jspaetzel 13y ago
  I think that this sentence needs to be gotten rid of completely. - Webmail is fundamentally not something that can run on your own computer. The word is "web" mail, not desktop mail, it's just going to confuse users. In addition to it being confusing, because of dynamic IPs and residential port blocking you may be able to run it on your computer, you just won't be able to do anything with it due to other internet infrastructure... - Sending mail from home is almost guaranteed to fail sometimes/often, due to dynamic ip ranges which are frequently blocked. - Port 25 and port 80 are blocked by most major american ISPs these days for residential services. Making this unusable from a home server. Not to mention it's against many ISPs terms of service to run a server from home without paying for a business package. (That's right, it's not just google fibre) - SPF records and other forms of email authentication? You would also need a third party DDNS service if using a dynamic IP. So with all of that said, I like the interface pictures. It could be a good competitor to webmail clients like roundcube and friends.
  - alextingle 13y ago
    > Sending mail from home is almost guaranteed to fail... It's an MUA - it can sent mail just as well as any other MUA. Use your ISP's smarthost if you are using it from home. > Webmail is fundamentally not something that can run on your own computer. This statement is plain wrong, even if by "your own computer" you really mean "your desktop box". I can run any server I like on my desktop box. If it has a well designed installer, then it would be as easy to set up as a "normal" app - the end user might not ever know the technical details. > The word is "web" mail, not desktop mail, it's just going to confuse users. Now I do agree with you. The product seems to be a little bit of both, so there is some potential for confusion. "Web-mail you run on your own computer" does seem to explain it pretty well though.
guygurari 13y ago
I applaud your efforts! I did not see mobile mentioned. Will there be a mobile-friendly version of the web client? Will there be IMAP access from (e.g.) mobile devices? (Under 'Current Features' you mention IMAP, but I did not understand if this refers to you acting as an IMAP client or server.) By the way, there seems to be a copy-paste typo in the description for 'Spam Detection'; it reads 'PGP encryption and verification of emails and recipients'.
- HerraBRE 13y ago
  Yes, making the web mobile friendly is definitely on the list of things to do. Native apps may come later, once the APIs have stabalized a bit. The current IMAP support is functioning as an IMAP client, we haven't started work on the server side yet. And thanks for the typo report :)
  - alternize 13y ago
    so if i understand you comment right: it will be a MUA that accessed through a webbrowser, and one still needs to have an IMAP capable email-account somewhere else?
    - HerraBRE 13y ago
      Yes, at least to begin with, we are not providing people with domains or e-mail addresses. IMAP, POP3, or run your own SMTP server...
      - alternize 13y ago
        but then I'm not really seeing what the advantagess over running thunderbird + engimail locally or using roundcube (which also has openpgp support built in) would be?
      - unhammer 13y ago
        sigh … I already have email clients that do PGP on my email that is hosted on Someone Else's Computer. It doesn't seem like Mailpile moves me a single step away from the dragnet. When I saw the "pagekite" username on github, I immediately hoped for plug-and-play self-hosted IMAP/SMTP. Here is what I envisioned in the blissfully ignorant moments until I read what the project was actually about: The user gets to download/buy a USB stick image / raspberry pi SD image. After plugging it into a pi or other box and turning that on, user types in the URL "mailpile" on their laptop web browser and on first run, user gets asked by web app to plug in a big harddrive for storing email on[1]. The box runs some IMAP server (dovecot?), connected to some MTA that does TLS (postfix?). The user has paid for an already setup domain name, kept in sync with the IP address of that box (which runs a dyndns-like daemon), user also gets access to some server that relays SMTP without breaking TLS (since most mail servers will not accept SMTP from just any dynamic IP). So on first run, the user also has to enter the credentials for the service they paid for, these credentials are used to let the box get its SSL key signed by the CA, tell the dyndns service that this box gets to update this domain name etc. Now if two users run this, they don't even need PGP to communicate in an encrypted way, it looks just like any other sent email. Nor can anyone requisition their mail without breaking into their house. So the paid service would be to get a dyndns-updatable domain name with SSL, and access to some server that relays SMTP. The service would have to dole out domain names and either be a CA itself, or be able to intermediate in the SSL key signing process. [1] For bonus points, dejadup runs there and user gets to say "send encrypted backups to dropbox/some ssh account/some other USB drive"
eps 13y ago
> Smári is the director if the International Modern Media Institute of
ippisl 13y ago
What about anonymity ? email has a potential for better anonymity than TOR via mixmaster or other remailers. Are you considering those features ?
- HerraBRE 13y ago
  It's not on the roadmap yet, but that is why we want to build a community, to see what people want.
barend 13y ago
Your introductory text and video mention the NSA and PGP. The PGP system has been around for a long time without getting any mainstream traction. There are numerous reasons for this failure, but the general complexity of public key crypto has to be one of them. On the project page you write > An intuitive, modern user interface makes strong security accessible to everyone. Can you share a bit more about the way you envision this?
- HerraBRE 13y ago
  Big, big topic. I suggest you follow our Twitter account or something, we'll probably be blogging about this later on in the campaign.
alecco 13y ago
Thank you! will donate today. What about perfect forward secrecy for server connections? What about transparent text compression?
- HerraBRE 13y ago
  Sounds like those are out of scope, that's just down to correctly configuring the SSL server. But yeah, I hope we correctly configure our SSL servers. ;-)
rhizome31 13y ago
Why AGPL rather than a more liberal license like BSD or MIT? Edit: Just to clarify why I'm asking this, the project looks very interesting and I suppose the choice of AGPL wasn't made lightly, as it might slow down adoption by commercial organizations, so I'm interested in the reasoning behind this choice.
- HerraBRE 13y ago
  This is something we have debated extensively. Our main goal is to improve privacy and security on-line - giving cloud providers yet another free tool with which to build proprietary services and lock in more users and their data feels like it would be counterproductive. However, we are open to discussing, and if a significant fraction of our backers would prefer a more liberal license we will probably switch.
  - alecco 13y ago
    Please stay AGPL. It's the right choice for these times. BTW, beware of code ownership of pull requests from corporations.
    - pixelcort 13y ago
      Regarding Pull Requests, this is quite important if and when you want to change licenses, or dual license. Make sure you have on file release forms for every copyright holder who submits code that grant you permission to relicense later on. For one line bug fixes it can be a pain, but it's worth it. One problem with this though is that it places an unfair advantage with the current maintainer. A fork of the project wouldn't inherit the relicensing permissions from all the contributors.
      - icebraining 13y ago
        Ugh, why? You're just discouraging people from contributing by forcing them to accept that their code might be used in a matter they don't approve of in the future.
jerrac 13y ago
Any plans for .deb/.rpm repositories?
- HerraBRE 13y ago
  Of course, but that's months away. We gotta write the software first!
  - jerrac 13y ago
    'Course it's months away. :) I've noticed that some applications don't offer their own repositories. So I've been left with either relying on the distributions out of date packages, or installing the application manually. That's why I asked. I'd rather use your repos so that I can keep it up to date.
    - tmzt 13y ago
      Another option is packaging it with docker (http://docker.io http://docker.io) so it could be dropped onto an existing system quickly.

jeffbr13 13y ago

I'm super-happy that someone is at last trying to build a self-hosted competitor to Gmail. Sure, I can set up my own mailserver already, but the amount of effort it takes is too much compared to just setting up a Gmail account. If they can get set-up and spam-protection right, then this could be huge!

StavrosK 13y ago
Bonus points for it being installable with one "docker build" command. I would definitely give it a shot, at the very least.

ghshephard 13y ago

I like the concept - but it's missing a discussion of how they handle what I consider to be (by a pretty large factor) one of the most important feature in email - Anti-Spam. Gmail (which I'm not suggesting is an ideal, just what I happen to use) doesn't even bother to show me my spam folder - and, in the last week, it's redirected 1178 messages there.

HerraBRE 13y ago
Absolutely. I'm the lead developer - I spent almost 6 years working on anti-virus and anti-spam, so rest assured we know this is a big deal. :-) There is alot of quality stuff in the open source world already which we will be able to build on. Update: To clarify why we left it out of the pitch - we just took it for granted that you can't have a functional e-mail client without dealing with spam.
- eps 13y ago
  You should clarify it for sure. This is really important and it's hard to do properly.
- anentropic 13y ago
  Nothing I tried ever handled spam as well as Gmail, I was drowning in it, it's the number one reason I use Gmail. I see so little spam now I think if everyone used Gmail the spammers would have to give up. There are plenty of nice-enough webmail UIs around, and people complain about the speed of Gmail but I find it perfectly fine. Spam's the thing.
Semaphor 13y ago
I recently switched to fastmail.fm and I really can't complain about their spam filtering even though they are way smaller than gmail.

msvan 13y ago

It‘s still decidedly aimed at techies though. I guess it'll be another few years before the benefits of a Free Software Gmail competitor will be accessible to the layman.

brennannovak 13y ago
Hi there. I'm the UI/UX designer on the Mailpile team. Making every aspect of MP easy for non-techies is my primary concern. We aim to be easier than Wordpress with our Alpha release in Jan 2014. Please give me any feedback concerns with out to achieve this goal :)
- WayneDB 13y ago
  Feedback: IMAP and POP3 would let everyone continue to use the native apps that they know and love for their UX. The web sucks for apps. It just does. Making robust dedicated native apps for each major platform would be a real differentiator.
  - brennannovak 13y ago
    Thanks for your feedback! We definitely would like to build native (mobile) apps for Mailpile- small (and important) steps, first though :)

petercooper 13y ago

Weird that the description of what it actually is is below the fold :-) However: Mailpile is a modern web-mail you run on your own computer.

marquis 13y ago

I applaud these goals however if we were to ever consider moving from Google Apps (which we would) it would only be for an open source project given that privacy is becoming the more critical issue as the years go on. It would be great to see a subscription based email service such as this where the source is fully available for scrutinizing and patching. Edit: Great, so the source is already available.

deleted 13y ago
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marcosdumay 13y ago
This is an open source project. Also, if privacy is important for you, you shouldn't look into subscription services, whatever software package they use.
- marquis 13y ago
  That's fantastic. I didn't see any information about this on your page so you might want to make this clearer (I assure you I read it first before commenting, then went back and saw the Fork on Github ribbon, the only indication). By subscription I mean that I am happy to support an open source project with regular funding. Initial funds from Indiegogo are not sufficient to maintain a long-term service and we'd be hesitant to move our most important business infrastructure to something that may not be updated regularly as the security environment changes. If you were to look into making this a business with recurring revenue I believe you would find there is a lot of support.
  - andrewcooke 13y ago
    there's a big red line across the top right corner pointing to github (and licencing info there). there's another link to github near the end. apologies for a previous post that used strong language, but you really can't have looked very hard. (you know, i just read chapter 2 of 'how to win friends and influence people' which tells me that criticising people never works because they simply work harder to justify themselves. it's the most depressing thing i have read in a long time, but it seems to be horribly, universally true. and it's so frustrating when the world seems to be populated by incompetent idiots. how do you convince someone 'nicely' that they complained about something without even reading it?)

AxisOfEval 13y ago

Noble goals. With all the NSA action, this is something whose time has come. Where do I donate?

vidar 13y ago
http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/mailpile-taking-e-mail-back http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/mailpile-taking-e-mail-bac...
rocky1138 13y ago
I get what you're saying, but what's to stop them from monitoring the transmission and how can you be sure the receiver of your sent email is running a secure email as well? I don't think this does much to stop snooping.
- takluyver 13y ago
  It doesn't guarantee that any specific e-mail is snooping-proof, but it makes it hard for someone to trivially look through all your e-mails from the last five years.

rufugee 13y ago

I just switched back to Zimbra (also open source) after years with Google Apps. It's been a spectacular experience so far, and it's nice to have email fell like email again (not to mention being in full control).. It has everything I need: a rich web client, good smartphone phone support, good spam filtering, and a good community.

1O0101ll100O 13y ago
Another vote for Zimbra. Seriously, it's not that hard to install and setup. Once you have it all going the capabilities are immense. It also lives on your machine, using your SSL certs, and using as much in-place HDD encryption as you want. This is how you take your privacy back. You care enough about it to do it yourself.
- cromwellian 13y ago
  It's also how you give yourself a headache having to sysadmin a machine. I myself used to run Zimbra and switched to Google Apps. Too much irritation with backups, monitoring, security, et al.
Nux 13y ago
+1 for Zimbra as well, is a very nice Exchange replacement! Having said that, Zimbra was just acquired recently (yes, AGAIN) and this fact makes me nervous, not sure whether to despair or rejoice.[1] Mailpipe, if it ever happens, should help a lot getting some of that mail from the claws of Gmail and the likes. They can have my money. [1] - https://blog.zimbra.com/blog/archives/2013/07/telligent-acquires-zimbra-from-vmware.html https://blog.zimbra.com/blog/archives/2013/07/telligent-acqu...

rufugee 13y ago

deleted 13y ago

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tebeka 13y ago

Two things: 1. IMO sup (http://supmua.org/ http://supmua.org/) is more mature and does about the same. However it's interface is a curses based one which is a plus and a minus. 2. Why not use an existing search products (like xapian)?

HerraBRE 13y ago
This is actually answered in the FAQ on our Indiegogo campaign: http://igg.me/at/mailpile http://igg.me/at/mailpile Mostly, the reason we do things the way we do, is because one of our primary goals is to make an end-user desktop app. Packaging is therefore a significant task and minimizing dependencies will help a lot. We still have quite a bit of work to do on our website and message.
stevekemp 13y ago
One of the reasons I started lumail (http://lumail.org/ http://lumail.org/) was because none of the existing console clients worked for me. Specifically sup will die importing my 2013-1994 = 19 year mail archive.

TomAnthony 13y ago

This looks great! I have a couple of questions: - Any plans for a plugin/extension system? - Are there any screenshots of the interface anywhere? Thanks! : )

barend 13y ago
The landing page mentions plugins. There are screenshots in the video, although I don't know whether these are concepts or existent.
falk 13y ago
At around 1:30 in their Indiegogo video they show what I assume is the user-interface of the app. Looks nice. http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/mailpile-taking-e-mail-back http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/mailpile-taking-e-mail-bac...

beachstartup 13y ago

if you need free site hosting PM me. i run an infrastructure company and are looking to support open source projects (we rely heavily upon open source).

rpdillon 13y ago

This is exactly what I've been looking for! It seems the product is aimed at technical users (at least initially), though there are some technical details I didn't see in the video, description or FAQ: - This is an MUA, correct? Based on the features on the project page, it sounds like MailPile will not act as an MTA or MDA, and is predominantly interfacing with mbox/maildir. I see features for IMAP and POP3 on the roadmap, but its not clear if using those protocols is idiomatic for MailPile. - How is PGP/GPG handled? The server-side code for MailPile must have access to my secret key, correct? Is MailPile's web interface then accessible via HTTPS (given the proper cert)? - Is there a plan for a key management interface? - It sounds like the MUA itself (MailPile) is a server, and it would access maildir/mbox directly. Is there any API planned for accessing that data through MailPile's programatically, or is MailPile's main goal to provide a browser interface? - This might have been covered, but will the web interface support mobile as well? Thanks for working on this...it really sounds like a great project!

aet 13y ago
Also check lavabit.com
HerraBRE 13y ago
Thanks! The idea is you run Mailpile on a machine you control (it is an MUA), either your laptop (and connect to localhost) or a home server like a plug computer or something like that - basically somewhere where you feel comfortable storing your secret keys. And yes, API access to mail is something we already support, every "command" can return either HTML, plain text or JSON. Probably XML to come as well. We'll have to help with key management, otherwise it won't be usable by normal folks. Mobile web support, yes, probably sooner than later. Hope this clarifies!
- rsync 13y ago
  Yes, this is also something I very much want. I personally use (al)pine over SSH, so I don't need this ... my email is already on my own mailserver and I already access it over a secure channel, etc. But my wife ... she's not going to put up with pine. So then I run a pop daemon. And she pops from gmail. And her email is in third party hands, etc. If there were a decent web mail client, I could turn off popd, one less open port, and access only over SSL. Which I would hide with port-knocking, of course. I can teach her port-knocking, right ?

arcameron 13y ago

Hi guys, If you're interested in this, you might also want to check out: https://echoplex.us https://echoplex.us (overview) https://chat.echoplex.us https://chat.echoplex.us (in action) https://github.com/qq99/echoplexus https://github.com/qq99/echoplexus (github) Lead developer here, FYI

johnchristopher 13y ago

Nitpicking: Thumbnails shouldn't be high-res pictures that actually are scaled to stamp proportions. It's slow to appear on poor connection and for a moment I thought there were no screenshots and just words like "compose". And it slows down my poor 2nd gen asus notebook.

nhangen 13y ago

I'm in the crowdfunding business, so I feel strange saying this, but I'm really turned off by this model of 'pay us in advance for developing a product that hasn't been market tested or validated,' especially when asking for a sum as large as is $100,000. What happened to building something and selling it? According to the campaign page, the need is so great because: "We're asking for a lot of money, so of course you should know why. $100.000 means paying two people $4166 a month for a year, including all taxes, insurance and other fees." I suppose people get what they pay for, but I find it insulting to ask me to pay your salary for a year so that you can avoid risk. If you were truly concerned about online privacy, you'd build it anyway. So is privacy the mission, or the pitch?

tstrimple 13y ago
I see it as a form of customer development. The days of building something and hoping people like it when you're done should be over. If they can generate enough interest to support the development they know they are working on a product that people are interested in and will actually pay them for.
ptype 13y ago
Actually, I don't think they are looking to build a business out of this? From the web site: "This is the Mailpile business model. As long as members of our community are willing to fund development (we will ask you to renew your membership in a years' time), we will dedicate ourselves to Mailpile and build the secure web-mail client you want."
- ChuckMcM 13y ago
  This and the parent combined are the interesting bit. So this is exactly the Richard Stallman model of software. Pay people to develop it, don't charge anything for the software and give away the source. There is no economic incentive for the donors (they might get a mail program, might not, but they will never get their money back or a return on that money.) I suppose rms originally imagined that someone like the mailpile people would take the money they were given to create mailpile and give it to some other developer to create the tools they need. However, as we see in this campaign, all the money they get will go toward feeding, housing, and insuring themselves. (wait till they learn about payroll taxes, that will make them fiscal conservatives in a hurry :-) Like the parent comment I can see how this works in the "old" world (make a company, product, sell it, rinse and repeat) but am curious to see if it can work in this other way.

srid68 13y ago

It is very good you are attacking this problem, but is this the right way to attack the email problem? According to Paul Graham frightening startup ideas http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html, email is a bad ToDo list, How are you going to implement a better Todo list? I have created a alpha prototype which attacks these problems conceptually, namely, Message Classification, Message Sharing, Bidirectional Messaging, Pull Messaging, Sender Revocation, Message Expiry, Centralized Attachment etc as a Mobile App but approached this as a separate todo protocol using the Push Messaging Infrastructure. You can download the working app from Google Play https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=priya.pullgrid.v1 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=priya.pullgrid... and can see a website created http://www.pullworld.com http://www.pullworld.com (Undocumented - You can download the Frontend App Html Source - Have not even shared in HN as Show HN because it is incomplete in documentation). The purpose of the Prototype is just as a proof of concept and not really to solve the email problem. I would love to share my knowledge/architecture if you are interested, so that you can really attack this problem as envisaged by pg and since you are planning to do it open source and with email, would love to contribute if you are thinking of mobile in the future using Html/OpenGL based client.

gcr 13y ago
I'm not sure about that idea. A tongue-in-cheek evaluation: http://pastebin.com/Xf1RffNV http://pastebin.com/Xf1RffNV
TimPC 13y ago
I think mailbox solves the to-do list problem well enough that it's hard to catch them on that dimension. On the other hnad, there are plenty of new thorny security issues that can generate popular interest. Running a crowd-funder is a good way of proving a market.

lnanek2 13y ago

Thumbnail images under the interface section are coming up broken.

didip 13y ago

It uses CGI eh? Old school, I like it! * It's a bit hard to find where the HTML/JS templates are. I think that's important for folks who are good at design and willing to help the project. * search.py, looks like it stores indexes in memory, is that correct? Will it work if I run multiple instances of httpd?

mikaelf 13y ago

You have got to get rid of that logo.

brennannovak 13y ago
Mailpile UI/UX designer here- thanks for the "feedback" I guess... What bothers you about our current logo, specifically?

schabernakk 13y ago

this looks awesome, lots of luck. Am I understanding this correctly that this is basically a selfhosted imap/pop/smtp frontend? I am curious how you guys would use it, i.e. where would you actually host your emails? Running your own mailserver on a vserver sounds fun and not to expensive but I don't know if I want to maintain something like that in the long run. If something breaks this just sounds like a lot of work. You guys pay for mail hosting? Use the one that comes with your website domain?

MrGando 13y ago

Prime member... hope this project goes through.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

oakaz 13y ago

We all need to back this project to get rid of the monopoly of Google.

icebraining 13y ago
Google doesn't have anywhere near a monopoly on Email. They are barely ahead their two largest competitors.
- oakaz 13y ago
  and what planet do you live in? everybody I know has a Google account only because of either Gmail or Youtube.
  - icebraining 13y ago
    I live on the planet not defined only by your personal experiences.
    - oakaz 13y ago
      Ok then go research how many companies in silicon valley give their employees Gmail. All the companies I've been worked provided Gmail only because there is really not a good open source option. And Google accounts is a huge monopoly that obviously sounds bad enough to hurt your feelings. But this is the reality. Google is a valley of shit and most of us want to move on from it.
      - icebraining 13y ago
        Criticizing Google doesn't "hurt my feeling". I've moved away from Gmail and other Google services (not all) a few years ago because I disagreed with their options. But that doesn't mean I have to agree with nonsensical claims such as Google having a monopoly on email. Maybe they do on Silicon Valley, but I'm sure you realize that's a pretty insignificant subset of email users.

znowi 13y ago

Very timely. Might be a viable alternative to NSA's Gmail. The tech lead is from the Empire though - an ex-Googler - not exactly a privacy caring company :) Maybe that's why he left :)

gcr 13y ago

How is this any different from every other desktop mail client (eg. Thunderbird, Inky, Evolution, Notmuch, Sup, Mutt, ...)? What makes this better?

HerraBRE 13y ago
This is a desktop mail client. It is also a web-mail you can run on a server somewhere if you so choose. It depends on how it is deployed. Contrasting Mailpile with other tools, one difference is that the basic design is that of a search engine, not a tool for reading mail from folders. Most current desktop mail clients are built on top of a bad paradigm, in my opinion. Another exciting thing about this model, is that since the UI is a website (of sorts), we can leverage the collective experience and creativity of the web design community. That is a much, much larger pool of talent than UI designers who know C++ or Objective C, or whatever. Finally, making the app a web server means you get an API to interact with your e-mail almost for free.
- stevekemp 13y ago
  I've been working on an extensible console-based mail-client for the past while. (http://lumail.org/ http://lumail.org/) I abhor the idea that clients only ever interact with messages from a single folder.
Freaky 13y ago
notmuch isn't really a client so much as a backend. A better question might be why this isn't using/building upon it.
- gcr 13y ago
  To clarify, Notmuch is a mail indexing and search system with a command-line/library API. It's very easy to integrate with mail frontends because of good design decisions (eg. it does very little, everything can spit out JSON for easy parsing, ...). As a result, many excellent frontend clients were written on top of it (an emacs mode that I use, a Mutt/Sup-like curses client, a GTK one, ...) Notmuch does two things: - Indexes a Maildir and places messages into a Xapian fulltext database. - Provides an API for tagging, threading, retrieving, searching, creating template replies, etc. for the messages in its index. Getting mail into the folder is the burden of another program (say offlineimap or getmail), and sending mail is also handled by other tools (say MSMTP or sendmail). I think Notmuch would have made an absolutely killer framework to base Mailpile off of.

sorbits 13y ago

They talk about privacy, but MTAs like Postfix can already encrypt mail via TLS when moving it to another host¹. GPG gives us a better guarantee, but more user overhead, and unreadable by many recipients. Additionally SPF gives us a way to check if the sender address has been forged. GPG signing is more robust, but again, more user overhead. Not to mention, I already have S/MIME support in my mail application and can get GPG support via a plug-in, but I use neither, because few recipients can handle it. So what is new with Mailpile? What is it supposed to change? In my opinion, if the goal is to make email more secure, we should look into ensuring that all MTAs is setup to support TLS and use it when delivering mail to other hosts (AFAIK Exim4 only announces STARTTLS when connecting to its submission port). Getting SPF records setup would also be a plus. This would go a long way in making email more secure, and only requires action from administrators of mail domains. ¹ http://www.postfix.org/postconf.5.html#smtp_tls_security_level http://www.postfix.org/postconf.5.html#smtp_tls_security_lev...

alextingle 13y ago
Exim can announce TLS to all comers. Set the tls_advertise_hosts option to '*'. (I believe Debian sets this by default.) http://www.exim.org/exim-html-current/doc/html/spec_html/ch-encrypted_smtp_connections_using_tlsssl.html http://www.exim.org/exim-html-current/doc/html/spec_html/ch-...

javascriptgod 13y ago

not another shitty mail service

brennannovak 13y ago
Wow, that's a useful comment. Thanks.

ivanbrussik 13y ago

i like it, and im willing to pay $5. to make it happen

jccalhoun 13y ago

Who are we taking it back from?

brennannovak 13y ago
Firstly, the centralized cloud webmail companies (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo) by giving people the ability to self host their email with an awesome webmail solution! ~Mailpile Designer

chrischen 13y ago

I'm not sure what responsive framework you're using, but the layout doesn't look good and the logo is messed up on mobile browsers.

topherwhite 13y ago

Should they succeed, let us hope that the mobile version of the webmail client will function better than the mobile version of your static site. Pretty unusable in MobileSafari.

brennannovak 13y ago
Hey topherwhite I'm the UI/UX designer of Mailpile- totally aware of the poor rendering on mobile at present. Working on fixing that- was swamped with other aspects of the campaign launch. Thanks for your feedback :)

joshguthrie 13y ago

I don't get it, how is it better than RoundCube[0], Horde[1] or any other webmail clients? Out of the six "reasons", three of them are already there in the wild (privacy, self-host and no ads), I'm pretty sure two more can be found/coded (search & encryption) and the last one (speed) is completely subjective to one's usage. I mean seriously, what's the appeal to paying for Mailpile when I could just use an open-source webmail client on my server? (Which I will by the way, thanks for the idea) 0: http://roundcube.net/ http://roundcube.net/ 1: http://www.horde.org/apps/imp http://www.horde.org/apps/imp PS: Here are more: http://www.noupe.com/ajax/10-ajax-webmail-clients.html http://www.noupe.com/ajax/10-ajax-webmail-clients.html

weirdkid 13y ago

This reminds me of Zoe. http://zoe.sourceforge.net http://zoe.sourceforge.net Back in 2001 or 2002, I was following the progress of Zoe, what I thought to be a very promising new approach to email archives. It kept your email in mbox or eml files, used Lucene for indexing and search and then provided a web interface on an embedded web server. The Zoe project is no longer active (the homepage is dead and the files are gone), but this MailPile sounds very much like it. Almost exactly like it. I hope it does better.

ricardobeat 13y ago

This project desperately needs a logo.

VexXtreme 13y ago

I wonder how long until they put a NSA rootkit in it.

tambourine_man 13y ago

Site is barely readable on the iPhone: http://imgur.com/IbwipKQ.jpg http://imgur.com/IbwipKQ.jpg

brennannovak 13y ago
Thanks! I'm working on fixing mobile rendering ASAP :)

moxie 13y ago

Here's why I want something like Mailpile: Right now, every single email I receive is encrypted. I have my public GPG key on my mail server, and every incoming email that's not already encrypted is encrypted using that public key. That way if the anyone compels my VPS provider for access, they just get a bunch of encrypted email. So my problem isn't receiving or encrypting email, it's reading it. The only real option I have right now is Thunderbird, which isn't great, and is no longer under development. Mailpile doesn't look like a mail service to me, it looks like a browser-based but locally-hosted MUA, which might be the remedy to Thunderbird that we need.

Bjoern 13y ago

What is wrong with e.g. Dovecot/Postfix + Roundcube ? How would this be any better? Is this intended to be a "close as possible" gmail clone?

vickytnz 13y ago

Urrgh, if you're going to ask for money, at least ensure you use 'its' correctly on the fundraising button (i.e. it should be 'reach its fundraising goal'. I really wish everyone would read the Oatmeal piece on apostrophes http://theoatmeal.com/comics/apostrophe http://theoatmeal.com/comics/apostrophe

daurnimator 13y ago

Mailpile stores in RAM about 180 bytes of metadata per message (actual size depends largely on the size of various headers), but Python overhead brings that to about 250B. This means handling a million messages should consume about 250MB of RAM - not too bad if you consider how much memory your browser (or desktop e-mail client) eats up. Totally killed my interest, I want to run this on a small server (e.g. NAS), for everyone in my family