Release Notes 201406 Alpha II

The second alpha release of Mailpile is available for download from github. This release is a technology preview release and is not meant for production use. Use at your own risk! See the release blog post for elaboration.

Reference platform and reporting

Our reference platform for this release is Ubuntu Linux 12.04. Other operating systems may work, but for best results we recommend testing on the reference platform.

If you use Mailpile with other setups, please consider letting us know how well it worked on Platform support/Alpha and filing issues if you run into any bugs.

Getting the release

The code can be downloaded like so:

git clone -b release/alpha https://github.com/pagekite/Mailpile.git

This branch may receive minor updates (bug-fixes) over the next couple of weeks, but core development will continue on the master branch. Please see the Getting Started page for further details.

There is also a live demo accessible on https://www.mailpile.is/demos/.

Highlights of this release

• User interface
  • Modern HTML5-based interface design
  • Original typeface
  • Integrated user-friendly PGP support
  • Alternate text and shell-based user interfaces available for power users
• Encryption and security
  • Support for reading and writing PGP/MIME encrypted or signed e-mail
  • The contents of incoming encrypted and signed mail is searchable
  • Contacts, configuration, logs and meta-data can be stored encrypted
  • First pass of Mailpile's threat model exists
• Search
  • Fast, extensible, custom search engine
  • The search index is stored using a one-way hash to protect sensitive data
• Tags
  • Can be used to organize indexed mail
  • Used internally to implement common e-mail metaphors such as "unread" and "inbox"
  • Messages can be tagged automatically, using static filter rules or Bayesian classifiers
• Spam filtering
  • A basic Bayesian spam filter is configured by default
  • The spam filtering engine can be used for other types of auto-classification of mail
• Interoperability
  • Support for reading mail stored in mbox, Maildir, Thunderbird, Mac Mail.app and GMVault formats
  • Basic read-only support for remote IMAP servers (work in progress)
  • Support for importing contact details from the GnuPG keychain and Thunderbird (Mork)
  • Selected messages can be exported en-masse to a portable mbox file
  • Mailpile has been tested and verified to run on various versions of Debian and Ubuntu Linux, and on Mac OS X 10.9.1
• Internationalization
  • Message strings in Python and HTML can be translated
  • Work has begun translating Mailpile into roughly 30 languages
• Extensibility
  • Plugin hooks for numerous types of interactions
  • Most core functionality is built using the plugin architecture
  • All API actions available as JSON-based API endpoints
  • Mailpile can be loaded as a Python module

What's changed since the first Alpha Release?

• Sending and composing
  • Auto-saving of drafts works
  • UI redesign to help prevent "oops I sent that from the wrong address"
  • Better feedback on who is receiving mail, in compact mode
  • Clearer indication which parts of a message will be encrypted or signed
  • Much improved logic for choosing which e-mail (user profile) is suggested by default for sending
  • The code which sends e-mail has been revamped to properly handle errors and retry as necessary
• Importing/syncing mail
  • New architecture, based on the concept of "mail sources"
  • Partial native IMAP support (on-line, read-only) is now in place
  • The SMTorP proof-of-concept server now limits resource usage and implements a form of hashcash to rate limit spam
• User profiles and contacts
  • User profiles are now implemented using the underlying VCard store
  • Profiles can be associated with specific domains or individual contacts (so mail is sent from the right profile)
  • Profile data is visible in the UI in various places and progress was made on the Contacts page
• Searching and tagging
  • Tags can now be decorated with icons and colors
  • The order of tags in the side-bar can now be rearranged by the user
  • An entire search can be scoped using a prefix, e.g. "subject: this and that" instead of "subject:this subject:and subject:that" (note the spaces)
• App internals
  • Our low level plugin APIs was redesigned to support javascript and HTML plugins, as well as Python
  • Plugins can now inject controls into the UI
  • Javascript or CSS from plugins is automatically included in the default app JS / CSS
  • Plugins can offer alternate HTML views for existing API endpoints
  • An internal event log and queue was added
    • Allows the app to keep state
    • Facilitates debugging and troubleshooting
    • Allows the Python process to communicate asynchronously with the Javascript front-end (e.g. notify about new mail or progress of in-flight message delivery)
  • The code which interacts with gnupg and openssl for encryption and verification of local data and mail was reworked and
    • should now work on Windows (as well as *nix platforms)
    • better support for encrypting local data: downloaded mail, settings, plugin state
  • Many, many bug-fixes and improvements to stability and performance

What's cookin?

• The IMAP mail source is under rapid development
• Uploading of attachments almost works, but not quite...
• A setup flow, to make it easy to set up Mailpile the first time or change settings later
• A multi-user version of Mailpile

Known bugs and limitations

• User Experience
  • The HTML user-interface is "read only" unless Javascript is enabled
  • HTML/Javascript performance has not been optimized
• Security
  • The search index is not yet fully encrypted
  • Drafts, mailbox state and Bayesian rules are not stored encrypted
  • Encryption features are only available to users who have a PGP key
  • PGP keys are not created by default
• Protocol support
  • Native IMAP/POP3 is incomplete