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Mailpile: Let’s take email back

mailpile.is

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Re: Mailpile: Let’s take email back

#91

Post by HerraBRE »

belorn wrote: post #82
nhangen wrote: 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…

> What happened to building something and selling it? Since they are already providing it for free to those who need it, and producing at as free software, selling it as a finished product is unlikely. > If you were truly concerned about online privacy, you'd build it anyway. Many people do altruistic work during their free time. crowdfunding means you can do the same work, but not be limited by what scraps of time t…

I have actually been working on Mailpile "altruistically" for a while, but sorely missed the ability to dedicate myself to it full time. Thus the fundraiser.

Re: Mailpile: Let’s take email back

#92

Post by HerraBRE »

alternize wrote: post #54
HerraBRE wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, making the web mobile friendly is definitely on the list of things to do. Native apps may come later, once the APIs have stabalized a bit. The current IMAP support is functioning as an IMAP client, we haven't started work on the server side yet. And thanks for the typo report :)

so if i understand you comment right: it will be a MUA that accessed through a webbrowser, and one still needs to have an IMAP capable email-account somewhere else?

Yes, at least to begin with, we are not providing people with domains or e-mail addresses. IMAP, POP3, or run your own SMTP server...

Re: Mailpile: Let’s take email back

#94

Post by nhangen »

HerraBRE wrote: post #91
belorn wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What happened to building something and selling it? Since they are already providing it for free to those who need it, and producing at as free software, selling it as a finished product is unlikely. > If you were truly concerned about online privacy, you'd build it anyway. Many people do altruistic work during their free time. crowdfunding means you can do the same work, but not be limited by what scraps of time t…

I have actually been working on Mailpile "altruistically" for a while, but sorely missed the ability to dedicate myself to it full time. Thus the fundraiser.

Totally get it, but why not share some of the risk with your supporters and meet them halfway? Asking for a full (decent) salary for two people for a year places all of the risk on your supporters and makes you look uninspired.

Edit: I can't reply to child, so I'll do it here.

It has nothing to do with a free ride. I don't want the product because the solution isn't right for me, but I would much prefer to pay a monthly fee for something than give a 'free ride,' as you call it, to a developer, in advance.

I have no sympathy for the family argument, because I spent a year building a business on the side while I was employed full-time, so that when I quit my job, I could support my family.

I believe there's something to be gained when the venture does not include a parachute.

Re: Mailpile: Let’s take email back

#95

Post by yakira »

andrewcooke wrote: post #57
tspike wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding your addendum, if you really view the people as incompetent idiots, I'd argue you're not all that interested in winning them as friends. In any case, just give the person the information they need without attacking them -- they won't feel defensive and they'll probably feel pretty stupid on their own. For bonus points, try to empathize and think about something stupid you once did -- surely you've done some…

i don't deny doing stupid things. look, here's an example from my recent posting history - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6121287 and the follow-up http://www.acooke.org/cute/HyperloopW0.html#Mon29Jul20132135... what depresses me is that people don't admit it, learn, and move on. instead we get "well, i am showing how important it is to make this information more explicit because everyone else is as dumb as i a…

The Github thing is a very minor issue, but it seems to have instigated a more general discussion. I think you will gain a lot from reading Carnegie. I empathize with your struggle; I used to think the same way as you, but now I have come to appreciate that influence is a dance of psychology, anthropology, economics, politics, and specific field knowledge. Correcting even the most blatantly wrong things in anything requires that you get right all the social forces around it. This has always been the case, but for whatever reason, some of us get the wrong mental model growing up - that pointing out the answer could affect change.

The more you care that the other side gives up their own facts to accept yours, the less effective your stance will be, no matter how nondisputable the facts. It is much better to act amnesiac and give people wiggle room so they don't feel bad about adopting a new point of view and fear being inconsistent with their past point of view. Correcting someone always implies they were wrong, not something to be reminded of.

Re: Mailpile: Let’s take email back

#96

Post by FooBarWidget »

nhangen wrote: post #94
HerraBRE wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have actually been working on Mailpile "altruistically" for a while, but sorely missed the ability to dedicate myself to it full time. Thus the fundraiser.

Totally get it, but why not share some of the risk with your supporters and meet them halfway? Asking for a full (decent) salary for two people for a year places all of the risk on your supporters and makes you look uninspired. Edit: I can't reply to child, so I'll do it here. It has nothing to do with a free ride. I don't want the product because the solution isn't right for me, but I would much prefer to pay a mont…

I could not disagree less. Asking him to "meet supporters half way" makes it sound like you want a free ride. No offense. These are adult guys, who need to support themselves and possibly a family. The software is already open source. And you want them to take even more risk although the Mailpile author has given a lot of his time to the community already? You seriously think everybody would be better off if he risks the financial stability of his family?

Re: Mailpile: Let’s take email back

#97

Post by HerraBRE »

rhizome31 wrote: post #79
beachstartup wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Contributing increases the odds we'll be able to make the test suite. ;-) But yes, the code is very immature, right now it is basically a proof-of-concept in the middle of being refactored into its first sensible iteration (as mentioned at the top of the README).

I built the search engine from scratch initially because it was just an interesting problem I wanted to experiment with. However, now that I have one that works, I see massive benefits to not having too many external dependencies. It makes integration and packaging ever so much more pleasant.

Re: Mailpile: Let’s take email back

#98

Post by tmzt »

jerrac wrote: post #86
HerraBRE wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, but that's months away. We gotta write the software first!

'Course it's months away. :) I've noticed that some applications don't offer their own repositories. So I've been left with either relying on the distributions out of date packages, or installing the application manually. That's why I asked. I'd rather use your repos so that I can keep it up to date.

Another option is packaging it with docker (http://docker.io) so it could be dropped onto an existing system quickly.

Re: Mailpile: Let’s take email back

#99

Post by HerraBRE »

alecco wrote: post #48
HerraBRE wrote: post #3

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

Thank you! will donate today. What about perfect forward secrecy for server connections? What about transparent text compression?

Sounds like those are out of scope, that's just down to correctly configuring the SSL server. But yeah, I hope we correctly configure our SSL servers. ;-)

Re: Mailpile: Let’s take email back

#100

Post by didip »

It uses CGI eh? Old school, I like it!

* It's a bit hard to find where the HTML/JS templates are. I think that's important for folks who are good at design and willing to help the project.

* search.py, looks like it stores indexes in memory, is that correct? Will it work if I run multiple instances of httpd?

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