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]
