Forge partnerships with e-mail hosting providers

[BjarniRunar]

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.

[turicas]

Issue #1124 may be a requisite for this one (in my opinion, it'll be easier to be adopted by mail providers if they can customize the interface easily).

[BjarniRunar]

@turicas: For some cases, maybe! ISPs using Mailpile as a web-mail they host for their users is not our primary use case though. Until the licensing question has been decided, it's not even clear how feasible that scenario is - ISPs may be afraid of the AGPL.

This is more about being able to offer the user the option to sign up for a new e-mail account from within the app, when the user runs the app on his or her own hardware. That doesn't require theme support, but it does require other integration and friendly relations.

[turicas]

Hmm you're right, @BjarniRunar.

[iredmail]

Is it a good idea to establish partnership with solution integrator like iRedMail (free, open source mail server solution)? http://www.iredmail.org/

It helps companies build their own full-featured mail servers.

[marxistvegan]

what about riseup.net?

[h3artbl33d]

I work for a relatively small hosting provider that mainly offers customized hosting environments. E-mail plays a rather big part in that. For the webhosting servers, we use cPanel - that already does ship with three different e-mail clients: Roundcube, SquirrelMail and Horde. However, we feel that those clients don't meet our criteria, especially when it comes to UI and UX.

After some research and inhouse testing, we decided to give Rainloop a try, which has a rather neat interface and is, in some ways, Gmail alike (just talking about the interface). Rainloop does offer GPG, but it isn't that neatly integrated as Mailpile is planning to.

We are, however, keeping a keen eye on Mailpile and are most certainly going to offer it to our customers as soon as it reaches the 1.0 milestone. And we are going to fund further development through monetary donations, as security and privacy should be a design aspect to internet services.

Right now, we don't have the time to collaborate on the code, but we are willing to brainstorm, test and give extensive feedback, should the need or wish arise.

On a personal note, I am a huge supporter of the whole concept that is Mailpile and really hopes it 'takes off' and is able to offer more security and privacy for those looking for it!

[BjarniRunar]

@h3artbl33d thanks, but hosting Mailpile in the cloud is explicitly not a goal we are working towards. People may still do it (it's free software after all), but we're probably not going to forge any partnerships or make any efforts to encourage it. The whole point is to store your e-mail on your own computer, not somebody else's. :-)

The partnerships we'll be looking for are partnerships to provide users with e-mail addresses and maybe domain names, not hosting of Mailpile itself.

[h3artbl33d]

@BjarniRunar Thank you for your swift reply. I guess I should rephrase it - I didn't mean that we were to offer it as a hosted webmail client, as that totally defeats the purpose of decentralization. Right now, the internal idea is to promote Mailpile amongst our users and perhaps even offer help setting it up, if the user ran into any problems or whatsoever.

Right now, I don't know yet if we can provide e-mail addresses. Domain names should be no problem, depending on your thoughts. If you need a few (up to 50?) domain names, we should be able to supply those for free. If every user should be able to pick their own e-mail domain (thus having the need for way more than 50 domain names), we can offer an attractive discount towards the users. If you want to discuss specifics, feel free to reach out to me. My e-mail address and GPG key can be found at keybase. :)

[BjarniRunar]

Thanks! I'll be in touch when the tech side is a but further along.

[brokep]

I'd like to advocate a partnership with Lavabit & Ladar. https://github.com/lavabit/magma. The magma server daemon, is an encrypted email system with support for SMTP, POP, IMAP, HTTP and MOLTEN,. Additional support for DMTP and DMAP is currently in active development.

[jasonbrown1965]

what about riseup.net?

Would advise against. Backed by the US gov's Open Tech Fund and at least one of the characters involved does not really pass the sniff test, having been flagged in some forums.

[BjarniRunar]

Dear @jasonbrown1965, I appreciate your concern, but please don't spread rumours in our issue tracker. If you have documented evidence that someone is not to be trusted, that's fine. But if the obvious response to a comment is [citation needed], please just don't make the comment.

Lots of projects take money from the OTF. That includes Tor (which Mailpile trusts and makes use of) and OpenKeychain (where I personally know and trust the developer) and many others - Mailpile applied as well, although we were rejected.