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Mailpile Alpha Release: Shipping Bits and Atoms

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Re: Mailpile Alpha Release: Shipping Bits and Atoms

#21
post #5

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.

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).

Re: Mailpile Alpha Release: Shipping Bits and Atoms

#22
post #17

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.

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.

Re: Mailpile Alpha Release: Shipping Bits and Atoms

#23

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 mo…

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! :)

Re: Mailpile Alpha Release: Shipping Bits and Atoms

#24

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.

Re: Mailpile Alpha Release: Shipping Bits and Atoms

#26
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Re: Mailpile Alpha Release: Shipping Bits and Atoms

#27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Re: Mailpile Alpha Release: Shipping Bits and Atoms

#28
post #18

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 :)

Re: Mailpile Alpha Release: Shipping Bits and Atoms

#30
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)

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