title: Mailpile
text: # Mailpile
  
  Mailpile is a free and open-source email client with the main focus of privacy and usability. It is a webmail client, albeit one run from the user's computer, as a downloaded program launched as a local website.
  
  ## Features
  
  In the default setup of the program, the user is given a public and a private PGP key, for the purpose of (respectively) receiving encrypted email and then decrypting it. Mailpile uses PGP and stores all locally generated files in encrypted form on-disk. The client takes an opportunistic approach to finding other users to encrypt to, those that support it, and integrates this in the process of sending email.
  
  The program preloads a lot of email data into RAM to accelerate search results. While the search results remain really fast despite large amounts of emails, this gradually slows down the start-up time of the program as stored email data increases. This feature will likely be altered in the planned Mailpile version 2.
  
  ## History
  
  Mailpile started out as a search engine in 2011.
  
  ## Crowdfunding
  
  The project gained recognition following an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign, raising $163,192 between August and September 2013. In the middle of the campaign, PayPal froze a large portion of the raised funds, and subsequently released them after Mailpile took the issue to the public on blogs and social media platforms including Twitter.
  
  ### Releases
  
  **Alpha**
  
  The first publicly tagged release 0.1.0 from January 2014 included an original typeface (also by the name of "Mailpile"), UI feedback of encryption and signatures, custom search engine, integrated spam-filtering support, and localization to around 30 languages.
  
  **Alpha II**
  
  July 2014 This release introduced storing logs encrypted, partial native IMAP support, and the spam filtering engine gained more ways to auto-classify e-mail. The graphical interface was revamped. A wizard was introduced to help users with account setup.
  
  **Beta**
  
  Mailpile released a beta version in September 2014.
  
  **Beta II**
  
  January 2015 1024 bit keys were no longer being generated, in favour of stronger, 4096 bit PGP keys.
  
  **Beta III**
  
  July 2015
  
  **Release Candidate**
  
  A preliminary version of the 1.0 version was released on 13 August at the Dutch SHA2017 Hacker Camp, where the main developer gave a talk about the project.
  
  