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Mailpile: Let’s take email back

mailpile.is

71–80 of 241 posts

Re: Mailpile: Let’s take email back

#71
post #26
post #3

Bjarni here, lead dev. Happy to answer any questions.

"Mailpile is a modern web-mail you run on your own computer." I think this sentence should be the first thing anyone sees when they go to the page. The text at the moment assumes everyone already knows roughly what Mailpile is, so I didn't figure it out until I read HN comments. Also, are there screenshots somewhere?

Brennan was working on getting some screenshots uploaded. We are obviously very busy reloading everything at the moment. ;-)

Re: Mailpile: Let’s take email back

#73
post #66

I'm in the crowdfunding business, so I feel strange saying this, but I'm really turned off by this model of 'pay us in advance for developing a product that hasn't been market tested or validated,' especially when asking for a sum as large as is $100,000. What happened to building something and selling it? According to the campaign page, the need is so great because: "We're asking for a lot of money, so of course you…

I see it as a form of customer development. The days of building something and hoping people like it when you're done should be over. If they can generate enough interest to support the development they know they are working on a product that people are interested in and will actually pay them for.

Re: Mailpile: Let’s take email back

#74
post #3

Bjarni here, lead dev. Happy to answer any questions.

Why AGPL rather than a more liberal license like BSD or MIT? Edit: Just to clarify why I'm asking this, the project looks very interesting and I suppose the choice of AGPL wasn't made lightly, as it might slow down adoption by commercial organizations, so I'm interested in the reasoning behind this choice.

This is something we have debated extensively. Our main goal is to improve privacy and security on-line - giving cloud providers yet another free tool with which to build proprietary services and lock in more users and their data feels like it would be counterproductive.

However, we are open to discussing, and if a significant fraction of our backers would prefer a more liberal license we will probably switch.

Re: Mailpile: Let’s take email back

#76
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fantastic. I didn't see any information about this on your page so you might want to make this clearer (I assure you I read it first before commenting, then went back and saw the Fork on Github ribbon, the only indication). By subscription I mean that I am happy to support an open source project with regular funding. Initial funds from Indiegogo are not sufficient to maintain a long-term service and we'd be he…

there's a big red line across the top right corner pointing to github (and licencing info there). there's another link to github near the end. apologies for a previous post that used strong language, but you really can't have looked very hard. (you know, i just read chapter 2 of 'how to win friends and influence people' which tells me that criticising people never works because they simply work harder to justify them…

I missed it too. The red ribbon in the top right corner is very easy to miss on wide screens.

If I do Ctrl+F for "open source", the only result I get is that your designer enjoys contributing to open source projects.

You should consider explicitly mentioning open source somewhere in the main content, how about in the Self Hosted section? Congratulations on the awesome project by the way.

Re: Mailpile: Let’s take email back

#77
post #66

I'm in the crowdfunding business, so I feel strange saying this, but I'm really turned off by this model of 'pay us in advance for developing a product that hasn't been market tested or validated,' especially when asking for a sum as large as is $100,000. What happened to building something and selling it? According to the campaign page, the need is so great because: "We're asking for a lot of money, so of course you…

Actually, I don't think they are looking to build a business out of this? From the web site: "This is the Mailpile business model. As long as members of our community are willing to fund development (we will ask you to renew your membership in a years' time), we will dedicate ourselves to Mailpile and build the secure web-mail client you want."

Re: Mailpile: Let’s take email back

#78
post #42

Two things: 1. IMO sup ( http://supmua.org/ ) is more mature and does about the same. However it's interface is a curses based one which is a plus and a minus. 2. Why not use an existing search products (like xapian)?

This is actually answered in the FAQ on our Indiegogo campaign: http://igg.me/at/mailpile

Mostly, the reason we do things the way we do, is because one of our primary goals is to make an end-user desktop app. Packaging is therefore a significant task and minimizing dependencies will help a lot.

We still have quite a bit of work to do on our website and message.

Re: Mailpile: Let’s take email back

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a custom search engine, written in Python. It works surprisingly well, most queries are answered under 200ms and tens of milliseconds are common once caches are warm.

any plans for a solr support? there's a lot of knowledge out there on how to scale solr for large webmail deployments like i.e. inside a large company or for forensic mail analysis.

I was wondering about that as well. Why not go with an existing search engine? Having checked out the code it seems that the project it still in its infancy. A lot of effort has probably gone into building the search engine though, which kind of seem like re-inventing the wheel but I'm sure you have reasons that I don't see. By the way, as test-infected coder, my first move was to launch the test suite, and it was a bit surprising that it wanted to run sudo :) I didn't go further for now because I don't have time to setup fetchmail, will do later. You guys seem to have a lot of potential and good intentions :) In my end of the world I'm also dreaming of "taking back email" and I happen to write Python for a living, so I'll be watching you guys very closely. Quite frankly though, I won't consider contributing until you have a proper test suite :) Keep it up!

Re: Mailpile: Let’s take email back

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a custom search engine, written in Python. It works surprisingly well, most queries are answered under 200ms and tens of milliseconds are common once caches are warm.

any plans for a solr support? there's a lot of knowledge out there on how to scale solr for large webmail deployments like i.e. inside a large company or for forensic mail analysis.

No plans at the moment. The design of Mailpile strongly implies a per-user index, so sharding by user is a very easy way to scale this up.
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