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FAQ What Is Mailpile
Mailpile is software, an e-mail client. It runs on your desktop or laptop computer and you interact with it by using your web browser. The goal of Mailpile is to allow people to send e-mail in a more secure and private manner than before.
We recommend you let Mailpile download your e-mail and store it on your computer. This allows you to read and write mail even if your Internet connection is not working, and gives you the option of deleting the mail from the server which in turn improves your privacy.
Mailpile stores mail it has downloaded in the Mailpile data folder, the precise location of which depends a bit on your operating system. It's easy to find from within the app though.
You don't! :-)
This is actually a very basic privacy feature; when your computer is switched off you can rest assured that nobody can access or read your mail.
If that does not appeal to you, you may prefer to leave Mailpile running on a computer that is always on. You can then access it over the network using your web browser.
Mailpile is like these solutions, in that you use your web browser to interact with Mailpile, to read and write and organize your mail. The user interface Mailpile offers is in many ways quite similar to those.
However unlike most webmail solutions, Mailpile is meant to run on your own computer, so you have control over your data and your privacy. Mailpile also does not force you to change e-mail addresses, it works with the e-mail addresses you already have.
Unlike the cloud-based webmail providers (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail etc.), Mailpile does not include its own mail server. This means you do not sign up for a "mailpile address", instead you use an e-mail addresses you already have.
As an example, you can use Mailpile with an existing GMail account, improving your privacy by configuring Mailpile to download the mail and then delete it from Google's servers.
If I use my old e-mail, won't my mail still go through the old servers and be kept there indefinitely?
Yes, your mail will still follow the same path through the network as before.
However, if you download and delete your mail, it will most likely get purged from the server sooner or later - unless your e-mail provider is really out to get you! Exactly how long this takes can be difficult to predict, in particular since most well-run mail providers keep backups of your mail.
Backups do not invalidate the approach though. Even if the mail remains on a backup tape in a vault somewhere, a hacker who breaks in to your account will not be able to access all your old messages. Leaving aside the question of whether our e-mail providers are trustworthy or not, we all have friends and family whose curiosity may get the better of them, and computer criminals frequently target perfect strangers.
Nothing is perfect, but deleting mail from the server really does improve privacy for most people. And Mailpile will help you improve it even further by making it easy to encrypt your mail.
Mailpile is free of charge, you just download it and use it. It is also free of advertisements. Development is supported by voluntary donations from our community, from people like yourself who want a more secure and privacy friendly solution for e-mail.
To make a contribution, please visit our donation page!
Yes, Mailpile is 100% Free, Open Source Software. You can find the source code online and make any changes you please on Github. We happily accept pull requests!
Quite the opposite, Open Source facilitates peer review and quality engineering.
If the entire community of security professionals can examine how Mailpile works under the hood, they can and will help us find and fix problems quicker than would otherwise be possible.
Many professionals are of the opinion that security tools which keep their inner workings hidden from sight, are in fact less trustworthy because they could easily hide backdoors or deliberate vulnerabilities.
Wikipedia has an interesting article on "Security through Obscurity" which discusses these philosophical issues in more depth.