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Mailpile Alpha Release: Shipping Bits and Atoms

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31–40 of 47 posts

Re: Mailpile Alpha Release: Shipping Bits and Atoms

#31
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!

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

Re: Mailpile Alpha Release: Shipping Bits and Atoms

#32
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 :)

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.?

Re: Mailpile Alpha Release: Shipping Bits and Atoms

#33
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?

Re: Mailpile Alpha Release: Shipping Bits and Atoms

#35
post #33

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/

Re: Mailpile Alpha Release: Shipping Bits and Atoms

#36
post #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.

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

Re: Mailpile Alpha Release: Shipping Bits and Atoms

#37
post #33

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.

Re: Mailpile Alpha Release: Shipping Bits and Atoms

#38
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Mailpile Alpha Release: Shipping Bits and Atoms

#39

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 :)

Re: Mailpile Alpha Release: Shipping Bits and Atoms

#40
post #13

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 :)
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