Mailpile
Open-source email client
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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.
| Mailpile | |
|---|---|
| |
| Original authors | Bjarni Rúnar Einarsson, Brennan Novak, Smári McCarthy[1][2] |
| Developer | The Mailpile Team |
| Initial release | 13 September 2014[3] |
| Stable release | 1.0.0rc6 (September 4, 2019[4]) [±] |
| Written in | Python |
| Operating system | Linux, macOS, Windows |
| Platform | Web platform |
| Available in | More 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) |
| Type | Webmail |
| License | 2015: AGPL-3.0-or-later[6] 2013: Dual-licensed[a] 2011: AGPL-3.0-or-later |
| Website | Official website  |
| Repository | |
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
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
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]
Moggie
On 2023, NGI0 Entrust grant was secured for Mailpile 2 codenamed Moggie.[21] As of 2025, the development continued on a separate repository.[22]
Notes
- AGPL-3.0-or-later or Apache-2.0+