Community Roadmap

Releasing 1.0 ... soon!

• Post 1.0 Roadmap
  • High level goals

    1. Forge partnerships with e-mail hosting providers

       Mailpile should forge partnerships with existing e-mail hosting providers, in order to guarantee Mailpile is available to their customers and their customers have a smooth and pleasant user experience. This may also be a potential source of revenue for the project and a way to fund ongoing development, depending on what sort of agreements are made. see details

    2. Forge partnerships with personal cloud projects

       There are numerous projects out there, aiming to provide general consumers with personal servers or "personal clouds" that will help them be more independent and private online. Mailpile should work with these projects both on technical and potentially business fronts, as their goals are strongly aligned with ours and the technology complementary. see details

    3. Implement protection against viruses and phishing

       In addition to spam, viruses and phishing are serious risks that come with receiving e-mail over the Internet. Although Mailpile's built-in spam filter provides a degree of protection against these threats, further steps are necessary, many of which are outlined in our security roadmap. see details

    4. Improve end-user documentation

       There is a large amount of work that should be done in terms of explaining how Mailpile and it's many components work. This covers everything from context-sensitive hints within the app itself, to long-form manuals, to video tutorials, to the website presenting Mailpile to the world. In addition, the most critical parts of the end-user documentation will need to be translated to multiple languages. The core team will not be able to do all of this work ourselves, but we need to be sure infrastructure is in place to work with our community on this important task and it might be worth spending a portion of our budget on hiring tech writers, editors or translators. see details

    5. Make Mailpile useful in shared-hosting and multiuser environments

       Mailpile is currently a personal webmail client, which only handles e-mail for one person. The project should be expanded so Mailpile can be used in shared-hosting and multiuser environments, such as small to medium businesses and organizations. This will further our mission to bring user-friendly encryption to a wider audience, and make the project more sustainable as larger organizations become motivated to contribute resources to the development and upkeep of Mailpile. see details

    6. Make it easy for 3rd parties to develop plugins for Mailpile

       Plugins make it possible for 3rd party developers to contribute features and improvements to Mailpile, without needing to coordinate or seek permission. This is an important part of making Mailpile less dependent on the core team in the long-run, while making it easy for our wider community to add features that are tailored to their specific e-mail needs. see details

    7. Make it easy to backup and restore e-mail, contacts, settings and metadata

       People's e-mail contains large amounts of valuable personal information. Considering that part of Mailpile's mission is to make it easy for people to self-host and remove their private data from the corporate clouds, it is vitally important that we take steps to ensure this valuable data does not get lost due hardware malfunction, software bugs or human error. Mailpile needs to help people make secure backups of their mail, whether to removable physical media or to remote online storage. see details

    8. Make it easy to send e-mail over the Tor network instead of SMTP

       When an e-mail is sent, generally it is relayed from mail server to mail server in multiple hops. At each step, the people operating the servers have access to information about senders, recipients, IP addresses, the subject of the message and various other metadata - even if the body of the mail is PGP encrypted. In order to avoid this privacy leak, we should make it possible for Mailpile users to send each other mail directly over the Tor network. This eliminates the middle-men and may also improve the user experience, since when e-mail is delivered directly there is no longer any doubt as to whether it has been delivered or not: no more uncertainty as to whether it is stuck half-way on some intermediate mail server somewhere, perhaps wrongly blocked as spam. see details

    9. Make it possible to create custom themes for Mailpile

       It would be nice if web developers and designers could customize the look and feel of Mailpile. This will allow Mailpile to appeal to a broader audience and involve more design-minded people in the project. E-mail is such a large part of people's lives, that it is important that people feel comfortable and at ease in their mail client. It should be beautiful, as well as functional. In addition, there are certain communities with special needs that are best addressed with custom designs, whether for branding reasons, to foster a sense of community or to alleviate a disability. see details

    10. Perform usability studies on e-mail search and organization

        Performing usability studies, where people with diverse backgrounds and varying levels of technical skill, use the program can provide valuable insights into what needs to be improved and how. We should perform such studies with a focus on how to find and organize e-mail using Mailpile. see details

    11. Perform usability studies on encryption and e-mail

        Performing usability studies, where people with diverse backgrounds and varying levels of technical skill, use the program can provide valuable insights into what needs to be improved and how. We should perform such studies with a focus on encryption, digital signatures and the other "crypto" related capabilities of Mailpile. see details

    12. Perform usability studies on the setup and configuration

        Performing usability studies, where people with diverse backgrounds and varying levels of technical skill, use the program can provide valuable insights into what needs to be improved and how. We should perform such studies with a focus on how to get started and how to configure Mailpile. see details
  • Tasks

    1. Create web UI for Filters

       Mailpile has a built-in filter system, where messages that match certain search terms can automatically be tagged as they are received so the user does not have to sort his mail by hand. This is particularly useful for managing mailing lists. The web interface needs to expose this functionality. see details

    2. Implement support for viewing & editing Contacts

       Currently one can only add a contact but not edit them from the web UI. We need to add support for editing of contacts (adding & removing addresses), as well as polish the existing Contact View page! see details

    3. Implement web UI for enabling/disabling autotagging

       The Mailpile autotagger is good for more than just classifying spam; it can learn to automatically apply any tag. We should expose this feature in the app's user interface so people can use it. see details

    4. Upgrade to Python 3.3 or newer

       Mailpile is currently written in Python 2.7, which is no longer being actively developed and improved by the Python community. In order to stay current with the state of the art and reap the benefits of ongoing developments, Mailpile should upgrade to Python 3.3 (or newer). see details

Current Decisions