Mailpile is a desktop email client with a Gmail-like search function and good privacy features. It was successfully crowdfunded in 2013, and has now been released as a public beta. It’s an interesting option for anyone looking for an alternative to web and cloud based email.
A ‘Mail User Agent’, Mailpile isn’t an e-mail server. Like Mozilla’s Thunderbird, you enter the credentials of your email account, and it will download all of your messages and store them locally. Messages are indexed, giving Mailpile a fast and effective search tool. On its own, this is nothing special, but Mailpile also adds integrated ‘OpenPGP’ encryption, so your mail is safe if your computer is stolen.
Mailpile is free, and the developers intend to keep it that way. As it’s a beta, there are still some problems that need ironing out. Here are the highlights of Mailpile’s improvements and bugs:
Improvements:
– Getting started is easy: Mailpile now sports a user-friendly interactive setup flow
– Reading and writing e-mail works, including attachments
– Searching and tagging engine can handle hundreds of thousands of messages
– The user interface is clean and elegant, and the font now looks great in all browsers & weights
– The spam filter works well (as long as you correct its mistakes now and then)
– OpenPGP support is convenient and easy to work with, including searching for & importing keys
– There are packages for Windows and Mac!
Some of the things that still need work:
– The user interface has not been optimized, so it can be quite slow now and then
– The user interface needs some improvements to work well on smaller screens
– Need to integrate Tor to better protect users’ privacy
– There are still lots of bugs that need fixing
Mailpile is available for OS X, Windows and Linux.
Source: Arstechnica, Mailpile
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