

Mailpile Alpha Release: Shipping Bits and Atoms - yuvadam
https://www.mailpile.is/blog/2014-01-31_Alpha_Release_Shipping_Bits_and_Atoms.html

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JHSheridan
I'm definitely going to be testing this on my own server. I've been looking
forward to this since it was annouced.

One bit of constructive critism: You got to lose the Mailpile font (which
looks like some bastarization of Museo). I know it's part of your branding,
but it has no place in the UI. Not only is it much less readable than almost
any simpler sans-serif, but the huge x-width makes the text take up so much
more space than it needs. Your backup Helvetica Neue with the weight toned
down to 400/500 is a huge improvement alone.

Keep up the good work! This is a true service to society.

~~~
brennannovak
Brenann (Mailpile designer) here. Thanks for the note and feedback. Good eye-
it is a reworking of Museo (due to their license being non compatible with
GPL/Apache). Our font is still being developed, the x-width & kerning are far
from done and on our radar. After the font is fully done, if the spacing still
irks enough people (and ourselves) we'll revisit how and where we're using it!
:)

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aw3c2
Huge +: It works without Javascript!

Moderate -: It is not responsive, on a small screen the HUGE sidebar and top
header leave no space for the message.

edit:

Actually threaded message threads do not work without JS. All messages are
collapsed. With JS enabled I seem to have to click on each message to expand
it which is terrible UI.

~~~
brennannovak
Designer here. The responsiveness is being worked on (alpha release).

Curious about the clicking to expand msgs comment- this standard UI behavior
in Gmail as well!

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aw3c2
I don't use GMail so I have no idea how it works there. Having to expand every
single message strikes me as unnecessary mouseclicks (and hell on
touchscreens).

~~~
brennannovak
Gotcha. I personally like having all emails (in a thread) fully expanded, but
due to pushback from other ppl with "vertical space" and time to scroll I had
to go this other route. We will most likely at an "Expand All" link to the top
of the thread!

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hibbelig
Maybe this is a silly comment, given that this is just an alpha. I would be
happy about better keyboard shortcuts.

* Select next/previous message/thread

* Reply, reply all, forward, delete, archive

* Scroll message (most systems have space to scroll a page down and shift+space to scroll up, but scrolling by line would be awesome)

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brennannovak
Yah! We had keyboard shortcuts but they got commented out before alpha- will
be re-implementing soon :)

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leeoniya
cool. small peeve though, the side panel refreshes via fade-in every time i
nav anywhere, if you're redrawing the whole thing, at least disable the fade-
in so it's less distracting.

~~~
brennannovak
Designer here. Great feedback- will work on this soon ;)

~~~
ogreyonder
+1 to parent post. It looks awesome, the fade-in is kinda distracting. It also
re-fades the main area when you switch between categories.

To the coders: Nice job on using multiple URLs to allow pages to be viewed
without JS enabled. Having to reload each page when it is requested is not
trendy, but it's nice to know Mailpile will work on locked-down browsers.
Kudos!

~~~
brennannovak
Yah, this is precisely why currently there is more fading than we'd like. We
want to evolve to something that behaves like a single page app yet gracefully
degrades to non-JS users for read only browsing- thus takes a bit more time to
think & iterate on it!

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RyanZAG
Why does an MVP need an original typeface? Seems the opposite of minimum.

Looks good, nice work.

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fengor
saw the talk at fosdem yesterday. would be happier if they would have tried to
be just a mail user agent instead of their vision of being everything at once.

Well but maybe hte unix philosophy of doing one thing really well really is
dead

~~~
brennannovak
Brennan here from the team. Mailpile is just a user agent. The app talks to
GnuPG for crytpo. We follow the unix philosophy as much as it makes sense, but
for the overall experience of an MUA that is easily searchable + allows
sending encrypted mail, but also offers a modern web app interface- there must
be a certain size + scope of project :)

~~~
moeffju
I also saw the talk at FOSDEM. If Mailpile is just a MUA, why does it do its
own indexing, why is there talk about including a server, etc.?

~~~
brennannovak
Mailpile does indexing so as to be able to do complex searching of one's mail
index. We include a Python "web" server that renders our search engine's
result in the web UI, however one _can_ use Mailpile strictly via the CLI.

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biomechanica
I have been looking forward to this.

Of course there are a lot of features missing, but the overall feel of the
application is, so far, pretty nice. It's U.I is very nice. Man, I can't wait
for the final release.

~~~
brennannovak
Glad ya like what we are doing, thanks :)

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moeffju
I’m curious how the search engine is going to scale. Every time things like
that are reinvented instead of using something that already exists, like, say,
ElasticSearch, I will be skeptical. Then I looked at the implementation, and
it begins with "take _all_ the message-ids you know… then do a bunch of set
intersects on it". Um, seriously? Do you have some stats on runtime behavior
with, say, 250k messages?

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rjzzleep
are you a web developer by any chance? i keep seeing people wanting to use
elasticsearch for everything. the last thing I heard was indexing file
metadata in elasticsearch

just because a piece of software is great, it doesn't mean it's great for
everything.

why not use one of the many mailbox indexers out there ? like mu.

[http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/](http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/)

~~~
moeffju
Yes, guilty as charged, it was just the first thing that came to mind. The
point stands, though: Why not reuse something existing, tried and proven,
stable, instead of reinventing the wheel again.

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qself
This was launched yesterday at the FOSDEM conference and attracted quite a
crowd and interest. However, judging just by their presentation, the current
team will not be able to bring this product at the level it needs to be to
solve the problems they started on. They are smart people, and they get things
done, but don't put all your hopes in this basket. Good ideas but acute lack
of depth and sophistication.

~~~
brennannovak
Brennan here from the Mailpile Team. Thank you for your critique. The other
team members and I would love to hear a more substantial justification of how
we lack "depth and sophistication" to tackle this problem.

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aidos
Great news. Glad to see my donation being put to good use. I last installed
this back when it first got some traction but interface wise there was almost
nothing there. Even still it was showing good promise with what it could do.

Seeing it now it's evident that a lot of work has been going on. Kudos to the
team, their dedication really shows.

~~~
brennannovak
Really glad we seem to be delivering and making so many of our backers happy-
thanks for your support :)

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rdl
This looks pretty nice, especially compared to the open source alternatives. I
personally care a lot more about non-web-UI clients, but I know a lot of
people like web UI, and I love that you seem to care about security pretty
deeply.

I just donated. Please continue!

~~~
brennannovak
Thanks so much, glad you like what we're doing :)

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pedrocr
This seems to be the demo mailbox:

[https://demo.mailpile.is/in/inbox/](https://demo.mailpile.is/in/inbox/)

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jagermo
Gratulations on shipping the alpha.

Installing now and trying to get Offlineimap running with Yahoo/Outlook. Any
pointers?

~~~
brennannovak
No exact pointers, as none of us are Yahoo / Out look users- we'll happily add
any quirks you discover to our wiki
[https://github.com/pagekite/Mailpile/wiki/Getting-
started](https://github.com/pagekite/Mailpile/wiki/Getting-started)

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rjzzleep
thanks. i've been watching it for a while

but, i always thought the main hell of personal email setups is that you have
to deal with postfix or exim. which is why atmail was so great. milepile
doesn't help me with that does it?

[http://atmail.com/products/](http://atmail.com/products/)

~~~
brennannovak
Mailpile does not help deal with postfix or exim. We have various plans to
make the whole "email" pipeline easier + secure + cooler down the line!

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newman314
Why no HSTS? Or Content-Security-Policy?

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smari
Smári here, from the Mailpile team. There's no HSTS because Mailpile is
generally supposed to be run on localhost. We don't bundle SSL certs because
it simply wouldn't make sense. That said, we will be improving things w.r.t.
use of SSL and Internet-facing installations before 1.0, including
authentication mechanisms and such. We will also be doing some Content
Security Policy work before 1.0.

~~~
newman314
It should run on SSL even if it is localhost. Self-signed cert/adding a
personal CA is a valid config.

If you are proposing to be secure, I would think that you want to cover
security (encryption in this case) for both in-flight and at-rest data in both
local and internet facing configurations.

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acd
Big thanks to the developers!

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Nux
nice!

