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Mailpile

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30 pointssnake_case10 comments

Previous discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8315086

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7162299

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=mailpile&sort=byPopularity&pre...

So, it reloads the whole page on every email view? I don't mean to pick nits, but that's a pretty big disappointment, in terms of UI responsiveness. It's "double-click wait double-click wait double-click wait"; I expect email to be really freaking fast. My local mail clients (Geary and Thunderbird are my preference) are fast. One of my webmail clients is fast (GMail); the webmail project I help maintain (Usermin) isn't particularly fast, but it's a lot faster than this (and only reloads the mail div or frame, depending on the theme in use).

I understand the desire for a more secure mail client...but, I'm not sure this is dramatically more secure than existing mail clients that support mail encryption (all of the ones I've mentioned above support GPG encryption, except GMail, maybe?). Admittedly this client seems to support encryption of the entire mail store, which is cool, and something I should think about adding to Usermin.

I'm afraid this project put out a lot more hype than was warranted. They've been at this for how long?

The UI will become more AJAXy before 1.0, we're doing it progressively instead of making the whole thing JS only. So we get the UI working as a static page, and then progressively enhance. If you want to see it in action, you can try `plugins/load autoajax` on the CLI and see a lot of things go much, much faster. It's not done though, so lots of functionality breaks, which is why it is not yet the default.

Regarding the security stuff - supporting GPG is one thing. Making it usable is an entirely different beast, one which most mail clients have more or less failed at so far.

Sorry you feel disappointed (or are you just pissing on the competition?), but it turns out that this project is actually a rather large task.

We've been working roughly full time for about a year and a half, most of the time with one programmer (myself) for all the low level tech stuff (security, mail handling, packaging, you name it) and one person to do UI design and interface work. Life got in the way of our third team member contributing a lot of code, I'm afraid.

Sorry you feel disappointed (or are you just pissing on the competition?)

No, it's not the competition thing at all, though I can see how it might seem that way. I've been following Mailpile for a while with interest. We ship several installers for open source mail clients, and we even donate to some of them and contribute patches to them.

It's kind of an accident of history that we make a mail client; there wasn't anything comparable at the time Usermin came into existence (and on some fronts still isn't, due to Usermin's broader feature set, covering things like uploading and downloading files, file management, database access, system password changes, various types of user configuration, etc.). We don't really spend enough time on it for it to be an awesome mail client, and we don't have a good UI developer on-board, and we get excited when we can ship something else that is more awesome. Most of our users prefer Roundcube to anything else we support, and we're OK with that. If Mailpile becomes awesome, we'd be OK with our users liking it more than Usermin for most use cases.

I hope it wasn't too discouraging to read my criticism. It wasn't intended to be disheartening, though I guess I was harsh at the end (I've been following it so long, and with such enthusiasm, I'm a little frustrated it isn't awesome yet). I do think you'd be well-served to fight harder to get the UI really right and really fast, right out of the gate, before widespread usage. We're in the midst of UI growing pains (and really have been our whole existence as a project; Webmin is ugly as hell, but does so much more than anything else in its space that it still gets downloaded a shit ton, but it would make a lot of people happier if it also looked nice and felt nice to use).

I'm not sure where you'd run this. Most cloud compute providers intentionally list their network blocks on blacklists to reduce their attractiveness to spammers. Some consumer-class broadband providers do the same and some even block inbound port 25. There's also the issue of reputation-based classification of incoming email at the major providers--you may not do well against those measures using this.

Mailpie seems to be a webmail client, and only that. Thus, inbound blocking doesn't matter, only outbound.

There is a folder in bookmark bar named "Web Shiz" in the screenshot

Fire your designer

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