Mailpile Alpha Release: Shipping Bits and Atoms | Hacker News Reader

Mailpile Alpha Release: Shipping Bits and Atoms

mailpile.is

91 pointsyuvadam45 comments

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.

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! :)

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.

From the release notes:

Known bugs and limitations

    User Experience
        The HTML user-interface is "read only" unless Javascript is enabled

It's an alpha release, an MVP. Of course it's not going to be perfect on this type of stuff.

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!

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).

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!

Gmail auto-expands messages in a thread that haven't been read yet. Read ones are collapsed.

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)

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

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.

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

+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!

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!

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

Looks good, nice work.

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

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 :)

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.?

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.

Please point me to a copy of this "Unix philosphy" you speak of.

You can't, because there isn't one.

If you were at the talk yesterday, like I was, and actually listened to what they said they explained why they chose to do things.

That was the actual point of the of the talk. Plus they want additional helps (fosdem being a developer conference).

They explained their use of own indexing system (was an experiment, is <1000 lines of codes, search <0.250ms, etc.); why they are thinking of including TOR (so you get a generated foo@<long-string>.onion address so you communicate with having to register with any service but still speak with people on gmail), why they are thinking of including an SMTP server (it means that you can directly get mail routed to you, via your .onion address; and your communications metadata is far harder to get to)

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.

Glad ya like what we are doing, thanks :)

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?

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/

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.

Brennan here from the team. Yes, one can ask that question "Why not use [INSERT SEARCH / DATASTORE]" the answer is a quirky story about the birth of a neat software project, if you're curious check out our blog, site, videos, etc... Re: performance here is our current stats https://github.com/pagekite/Mailpile/wiki/Mailpile%27s-Perfo...

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.

Could you elaborate on why you think this is the case?

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.

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.

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

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!

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

This seems to be the demo mailbox:

https://demo.mailpile.is/in/inbox/

Gratulations on shipping the alpha.

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

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

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/

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!

Why no HSTS? Or Content-Security-Policy?

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.

just wanted to say it's great seeing security integrated into such a product from the start!

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.

Big thanks to the developers!

nice!

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