mailpile : blog

Posted by Bjarni Rúnar on April 18, 2016 ( Content may be obsolete! )

Avast! Be welcome to this latest irregular Mailpile status update!

In this episode, I will discuss:

1. A Strategic Spin-Off Project
2. Deletion and Tag Automation
3. GnuPG Collaboration
4. Piracy in Iceland

Progress towards a release has been very slow. This is entirely due to me being busy with other work - things that pay the bills, looking after my lovely baby daughter, buying an apartment and moving to Iceland. I'm swamped!

As I am often exhausted and pressed for time, I have had a hard time sticking to anything resembling a schedule and have basically indulged any vaguely productive impulses, rather than worry about roadmaps.

So if this doesn't look like progress towards a release, you're probably right. I've been very distracted. But it's progress all the same!

A Strategic Spin-Off Project

As mentioned before, Mailpile's desktop integration on Mac OS X and Windows is currently unacceptable and needs a lot of work.

We do have some code, however, and a rough design. In order to encourage people to help out (and maximize the utility of the code we've already written), I spun off the existing GUI code into a separate project: GUI-o-Matic.

This should both lower the barrier to entry and encourage contributions; You no longer need to check out all of Mailpile to hack on the GUI-o-Matic. And because it's a stand-alone utility, it's more likely that other projects will want to make use of it. We hope!

If you've ever wanted an easy way to add a cross-platform desktop graphical user-interface to your code (not just Python!), take a look: GUI-o-Matic is a bit like "dialog" for modern desktop environments.

Old farts will understand.

Deletion and Tag Automation

Did you know the current incarnation of Mailpile cannot actually delete e-mail? It's true. This was actually a deliberate, conservative choice to avoid losing valuable data during development. It was never meant to be permanent, but temporary hacks do tend to outstay their welcome...

In the context of shipping 1.0... well, a mail client isn't really a mail client if it cannot delete mail, is it? More pressingly, a tool which aims to safeguard user privacy has to support the most basic privacy feature of all: deleting unwanted data.

So I decided to (yet again) break the feature freeze and implement message deletion.

This had a knock-on effect. Mailpile's deletion strategy was supposed to be similar to that of other webmail: once things have sat in the Trash for a while, they get deleted automatically. Similarly, messages should automatically move from Spam to Trash after a while and blank drafts should get purged and deleted.

So Mailpile needed a way to a) detect messages had been untouched for a period of time and b) a way to trigger actions once a) was satisfied for a message carrying a particular tag.

So now Mailpile has exactly that!

The search-engine is used to keep a record of when a message tags were last modified, and each tag now has an automation section which specifies a number of days and an action to perform. A few times a day, Mailpile will search for idle messages in tags with automation enabled and either retag or delete the matching messages.

While I was implementing the configuration interface for this, I also added an option to enable statistical auto-tagging for any tag, as described in A Plan for Spam ... and Bacon!, and exposed a few more of the technical tag settings in the Tag settings editor. All features that already existed, but weren't really accessible.

So there we go, tags now have automation and you don't need any command-line black magic to create your own statistical tagging or time-based workflows.

These capability are now available to all tags, including user-created ones. Some of the potential use-cases include:

1. Deleting Trash after a while
2. Moving Spam to Trash
3. Moving untouched blank drafts to Trash
4. Creating statistical categories for promotions or paperwork
5. Creating a "Postponed" tag which hides mail from view for a few days

Now we just need an auto-responder and Mailpile will be able to automatically recognize and reply to tech support requests that have been unanswered for more than a week...

(In the process I also fixed bugs in the bayesian auto-trainer, the periodic scheduler that triggers it and the tag editing tools the UI - proper release work after all!)

GnuPG Collaboration

I write this, sitting on a train back home from London.

I was in London today to meet with Neal of the GnuPG project. We discussed how the projects could collaborate more closely in the future and some of the difficulties Mailpile has had integrating with GnuPG.

It was an excellent meeting and I'm optimistic that once GnuPG 2.1 (or 2.2) becomes widespread, Mailpile will be able to make full use of it without any horrible hacks.

Conversations will continue!

Piracy in Iceland

Finally, some bad news.

Iceland's government is broken and I feel an obligation to help fix it. I will be dedicating some time this summer to helping the local Pirate Party prepare for our next elections. Mostly I'll be working behind the scenes on internal party tools, but this inevitably means I will continue being distracted from Mailpile work. But don't worry, I'm not running for a seat in parliament. ;-)

If you can help out in some way to help pick up the slack, please get in touch on #mailpile on Freenode.

That's it for now, thanks for reading.

Time to pack some boxes and move to Iceland!