| Mailpile | |
| Author: | Bjarni Rúnar Einarsson, Brennan Novak, Smári McCarthy[1] [2] |
| Developer: | The Mailpile Team |
| Released: | [3] |
| Programming Language: | Python |
| Operating System: | Linux, macOS, Windows |
| Platform: | Web platform |
| Language: | More than 14 languages[4] 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) |
| Genre: | Webmail |
| License: | 2015: AGPL-3.0-or-later[5] 2013: Dual-licensed 2011: AGPL-3.0-or-later |
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.
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.[6] 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.[7]
Mailpile started out as a search engine in 2011.https://media.ccc.de/v/SHA2017-101-mailpile/oembed
The project gained recognition following an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign, raising $163,192 between August and September 2013.[8] [9] 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.[10] [11]
The first publicly tagged release 0.1.0[12] 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.[13]
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.[14]
Mailpile released a beta version in September 2014.[15] [16]
January 20151024 bit keys were no longer being generated, in favour of stronger, 4096 bit PGP keys.[17]
July 2015[18]
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.[19]