Mailpile Blog

> We want to be able to add new features that would exceed the scope of IMAP. Further, the current mail stack was just not built for a good mobile experience, and it's complexity provides a considerable barrier for emerging mobile clients. We want to cut off the legacy baggage and keep the entry barrier for users and developers as low as possible.

What new features? Current email infrastructure already implements everything mentioned on this page. There's mention of the "limitations" of IMAP and SMTP but it seems specious. Reading email is a pretty well solved problem now, and I think every popular language has libraries for IMAP and SMTP.

On the topic of IMAP's performance on mobile: there is an installed base of millions who use IMAP for their mail on their phones. There are many, many good email clients for Android (I recommend K-9 Mail, which is FOSS) and they work great. Presumably it is the same for iOS.

If they write a nice HTTP API for reading mail inboxes, that will probably be a nice option for people who for some reason can't or don't want to use IMAP, but there really is nothing here to move mail forward.

Mailpile is a lot more interesting (webmail and privacy features): https://www.mailpile.is/

If you like Proton features and want to move away from Gmail, consider Mailpile[1]. It's almost ready, there's a release candidate and packages for Debian/Ubuntu; it offers to protect your data with a master password like Proton; it supports GPG which with all its problems is still the way to encrypt your emails; and you can run it on your own server. Best of all it's open source and written in Python. You can know exactly what it does with your messages.

Mailpile is an email client (MUA) so you will need a server (MTA). At first you can try it out with your regular ISP, even Gmail. Later you can set up your own server. Setup is a little involved but much less than people tell you and, if you choose a competently run distro, requires very little ongoing maintenance.

With your own server, you can have it working exactly as you like. Export feature? No problem, you have direct access to the maildir, mailbox or the database. Want a catch-all? One switch in the config. You will have little trouble finding a provider who accepts your preferred method of payment, too.

[1] https://www.mailpile.is/

There have been various efforts to solve this problem for e-mail recently.
Mailpile[1] is a great web-based mail client that you can host. It stores mail encrypted and has a very nice interface that makes handling mail encryption easier for users.
Protonmail[2] is both a mail service and a nice front-end for handling encrypted e-mail. When a user sends encrypted mail through the ProtonMail interface, the e-mail is sent with a link pointing to a webpage that asks for a certain shared password. They have raised more than half million in their crowdfunding campaign.

Both are very user friendly, very promising, and still in early BETA.

1: https://www.mailpile.is/
2: https://protonmail.ch/

Funny I should see this today, I spent yesterday afternoon reading articles about Thunderbird and other mail clients and ended up migrating from Thunderbird to mu4e [0] (purely for reasons of usability).

If this is true (and there is some reason to doubt it, as this isn't the first time Thunderbird has been declared "dead"), and considering that Geary is no longer in active development either (maybe the Elementary OS guys picked it up?), Mailpile [1] might have a chance to fill that gap. Other than that, there's always Claws Mail [2].

[0] http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/mu4e.html

[1] https://www.mailpile.is/

[2] http://www.claws-mail.org/

...how is your [insert tech startup here] going to maintain a decent level of QoS if you cannot maintain it for a trio of IRCds and a trio node instances? You could even get away with DNS-only HA since it is purely internal so if A is down, everyone knows to connect to B or C.

The only reason I don't host my own e-mail is I haven't found an open source project that can truly compete with gmail's functionality and the fact I don't really care if Google reads my e-mail since none of it is sensitive.

I have high hopes for https://www.mailpile.is/ since if my Desktop is down, I'm screwed /anyway/.

Just my two cents.

> a decent mail app

This is probably the most painful thing on desktop at the moment, because no one gives a s* to desktop mail apps these days.

I recently switched back to evolution from Thunderbird, but where one if great, the other falls short ( in this case, GPG with Evolution is _painful_ ). Geary is... well, not mature, Claws and Sylpheed are a bit too oldschool and mutt is ... well, mutt.

I'd love to see something like Rainloop[1] as a real desktop app. Mailpile[2] is a nice idea, but is nowhere even close to the usability of Rainloop.

[1]: http://www.rainloop.net/
[2]: https://www.mailpile.is/