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Not at all.

"Mailpile will download your e-mail from a mail server much like Thunderbird or Mail.app and process it locally."

PRISM and other efforts at tracking associations operate at the server and header level, this is not a useful countermeasure. It may reduce the amount of mail you leave on the server -- but so would a reasonable mail reader configuration.

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If it makes it easier to use encrypted email, then it does a little--any emails with someone with whom you have exchanged keys would be encrypted, and thus while they do indeed still fly across insecure channels, they are (presumably) uncrackable.

Obviously, the vast majority of emails would still be unencrypted, and this does nothing for metadata. But anything that makes encryption less cumbersome to use is a good thing in my book.

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