NOTE: Mailpile is currently undergoing heavy refactoring work to accomodate a better UI and better programmatic access. Pull at your own risk! :-)
Mailpile is a free-as-in-freedom personal e-mail searching and indexing tool, largely inspired by Google's popular proprietary-but-gratis e-mail service. It wants to eventually become a fast and flexible back-end for awesome personal mail clients, including webmail.
WARNING: Mailpile is still experimental and isn't actually very useful yet. It'll tell you that you have mail matching a given search and let you sort it, browse threads and read messages... but the user interface and message composing/sending functionality is still very immature. If you just want a useful tool aren't interested in hacking on the code, you should probably check back later or follow @HerraBRE on Twitter and watch for updates.
Mailpile is developed on a Debian 7 system, running:
- Python 2.7
- python-lxml 2.3.2
- python-gnupginterface 0.3.2
It might work with other versions. :-)
You also need your e-mail to be in a traditional mbox formatted Unix mailbox, a Maildir or a gmvault backup repository.
Until we've properly packaged Mailpile, you will need to configure your
environment before running it, specifically the PYTHONPATH variable.
The easiest way to do that is to use the recipe from the Makefile:
$ $(make dev)
Once this has been done, you run ./mp as described below.
For best results, the next step is to tell the program your e-mail
address and set up basic tags (New, Inbox, etc.) and filters so
Mailpile will behave like a normal mail client. Mailpile can do this
for you, but if you are importing lots of old mail, you may want to
postpone the filter definition until after the import (see below), to
start with a clean slate:
$ ./mp --set "my_from: yourmail@domain.com = Your name" --setup
...
If you do not have a local working mail server in /usr/sbin/sendmail,
you may also want to configure a default outgoing SMTP server:
$ ./mp --set "my_sendmail: default = smtp:yourmailserver:25"
...
Mailpile does not currently access IMAP or POP3 servers directly, it
relies on other tools (such as fetchmail) to take care of downloading
new mail.
Mailpile will create and use a folder in your home directory named
.mailpile for its indexes and settings.
A simple test run might look like so:
$ ./mp --add /var/spool/mail/YOURNAME --rescan
The program prints details of its progress as it runs. Note that just opening the mailbox may take quite a while if it is large enough (it takes about a bit over a minute to open my 500MB mailbox). Once the mailbox has been opened, my laptop (a 1.66Ghz Intel Atom with a 5400rpm HDD) the program can index roughly four messages per second, so if you are processing thousands of messages you should expect it to take a few hours.
Stopping the program with CTRL-C is (relatively) nondestructive - it will try to save its progress and re-running should continue the scan from where it left off.
Mailpile has a built-in web server and will eventually include a proper web-based interface for searching, reading and composing e-mail.
The web interface currently has just one input field, where you can
type terms to search for. If you start the line with a / character
you can use any of the normal CLI commands, including viewing tags or
reading messages (/view 1-15).
Maybe someday you will build a fancier UI for us. :-)
If you want to run the web UI without the CLI interface, start the program like this:
$ ./mp --www
The server listens on localhost:33411 by default, you can change
the host and port by setting the http_host and http_port variables.
Setting http_host to disabled disables the server. Note that you
will need to restart the program for these changes to take effect.
The most important command Mailpile supports is the search command.
The second most important is probably help. :-)
All commands can be abbreviated to only their first character (the less commonly used commands use capital letters for this).
Some searching examples:
$ ./mp
mailpile> search bjarni einarsson
...
mailpile> search subject:bjarni
...
mailpile> search from:bjarni to:somebody
...
mailpile> search from:bjarni -from:pagekite
...
mailpile> search group:family -from:mom
...
mailpile> s att:pdf
...
mailpile> s has:attachment
...
mailpile> s date:2011-1-30 +date:2011-1-29
...
mailpile> s year:2011 month:12
...
mailpile> s dates:2011-12..2012-04-15
...
The default search will search in message bodies, from lines, attachment
names and subjects. Using a to/from/subject/att/... prefix will
search that part of the message only. There's no way to only search
bodies, they're too full of crap anyway.
Adding terms narrows the search, unless the extra terms are prefixed with
a +, then results are combined. Prefixing with - removes matches for
that term instead.
You can paginate through results using next and previous.
To view a message, use the view command with the number of the result
or one of the magic words all or these:
mailpile> search year:2011 month:12
...
mailpile> view 1 2 6
...
(Mailpile currently assumes you have less installed and in your path for
viewing e-mail. This is a temporary hack.)
You can also search from the command line with ./mp -s term,
but that will be a bit slower because the metadata index has to be
loaded into RAM on each invocation.
Here is a brief list of the special search terms:
all:mail All messages
att:<word> Search within attachment file names
dates:<B>..<E> Search dates from B to E
in:spam Same as tag:Spam
in:trash Same as tag:Trash
is:unread Same as tag:New
group:<name> Messages from people in a group
has:attachment Messages with attachments
has:pgp Messages with signed or encrypted content
togroup:<name> Messages to people in a group
The order command lets you sort results. Available sort orders
are: index, random, date, from and subject. Threading
may be disabled by prefixing the order with flat-, and the order
may be reversed by further prefixing it with rev-. Examples:
mailpile> order rev-subject # Reverse subject order
...
mailpile> order rev-flat-date # Flat reverse date order
...
mailpile> order # Default sort order
...
You can also change the default sort order by using the order
setting:
mailpile> set order = rev-flat-date # Change default order
...
mailpile> unset order # Use program defaults
...
Mailpile allows you to create tags and attach any number of tags to each message. For example:
mailpile> tag add Inbox
...
mailpile> search to:bre from:klaki
...
mailpile> tag +Inbox all
...
mailpile> inbox
...
The tag command accepts a single tag name, prefixed with a + or -
(for adding or removing the tag), followed by a description of messages.
The message description can be:
allwill affect all messagesthesewill affect currently listed messages- A list of numbers or ranges (
1 2 3 5-10 15)
All these are relative to the last search, so 1 is the first result
of the most recent search and all would be all matching messages.
Tags names are themselves recognized as specialized search commands in
the mailpile CLI.
If you want Mailpile to automatically tag (or untag) messages based on
certain search criteria, you can use the filter command instead:
mailpile> tag add Lists/Diaspora
...
mailpile> search list:diaspora
...
mailpile> filter +lists/diaspora -inbox Diaspora Mail
...
This will tag all the search results and then apply the same rules as new messages are received.
Filters are always processed in a fixed order, so even if one filter
adds a tag, a subsequent one may remove it again. This allows you to
define common patterns such as "All mail goes to the Inbox and is
tagged as new, except this mailing list and that junk mail". Run the
filter command on its own to get a brief summary of how to remove,
edit or reorder the filters.
Mailpile doesn't yet know how to read and index encrypted e-mail, but it
will in the future. In the future Mailpile may also know how to log on to
your remote IMAP and POP3 accounts and download or index remote mail.
This means for sensitive messages, the search index becomes a potential
security risk, as does the configuration file. More broadly, easy access
to all your communications can be a privacy risk in and of itself:
consider the search naked att:jpg as an example. It is almost certainly
worth taking steps to protect your Mailpile.
The simplest and most effective strategy, is to store your .mailpile
folder on an encrypted volume.
Alternately, if you have a GPG key and run Mailpile in an environment where gpg-agent is available for key management, you can tell Mailpile to encrypt its config and data using your key, like so:
$ ./mp --set "gpg_recipient = youremail@yourdomain.com"
Note that this only encrypts the main index and config file, and only
works if gpg is in your path. The search terms themselves are not
encrypted, which means the contents of individual messages could at
least in part be derived from the index. This problem can be mitigated,
at the cost of some performance, by telling Mailpile to use a one-way
hash to obfuscate the search terms:
$ ./mp --set "obfuscate_index = Some RaNdoM LongISH silly SECRET"
Note that if you change this setting, whatever has already been indexed will "disappear" and become unfindable. So do this first if you do it at all!
Mailpile's python code lives in mailpile/.
Mailpile's default HTML templates and Javascript lives in static/default/
Miscellaneous documentation is in doc/.
There are a bunch of variables that can be tweaked. For a complete list:
mailpile> help variables
...
JSON and XML versions exist for most web-based commands and requests.
For individual e-mails, appending message.xml or message.json to the
URL will provide a machine-readable rendering of the parsed message (for
a raw dump of the undecoded message, request message.eml).
For search results, append feed.xml, feed.json or feed.rss to the
path part of the URL.
For other commands, just append .xml or .json to the command name
(e.g. http://localhost:33411/_/help.xml is a very useless example).
Searching is all about disk seeks.
Mailpile tries to keep seeks to a minimum: any single-keyword search can be answered by opening and parsing one relatively small file, which should take on the order of 200-400ms, depending on your filesystem and hard drive. Repeated searches or searches for closely related keywords will be up to 10x faster, due to help from the OS cache.
This includes the time it takes to render the list of results.
This level of performance is possible, because all the metadata about the messages themselves is kept in RAM. This may seem extravagant, but on modern computers you can actually handle massive amounts of e-mail this way.
Mailpile stores in RAM about 180 bytes of metadata per message (actual size depends largely on the size of various headers), but Python overhead brings that to about 250B. This means handling a million messages should consume about 250MB of RAM - not too bad if you consider how much memory your browser (or desktop e-mail client) eats up. Also, who has a million e-mails? :-)
(Caveat: Really common terms will take longer due to the size of the result set - but searching for really common terms won't give good results anyway.)
A random laundry list of things I haven't done yet and might accept patches for:
- Delivery mode for adding a single message to the index (SMTP server?)
- Spam detection
- Improve conversation IDs assignment/threading
- New "attributes" for the indexer to facilitate smart searches
- Better query parser (terms AND terms) or (terms AND NOT terms), etc.
- Support for other mailbox formats
- Pseudo-mailbox for indexing pidgin/purple conversation logs
- Create a Maildir which GPG encrypts/decrypts its contents (for drafts)
- Support POP3/IMAP indexing (IMAP in progress)
- A nice Python/XML-RPC API for automation (in progress)
- A pretty UI on top of the XML-RPC API, or the HTTP/JSON UI. (in progress)
- Packaging improvements
- A user-friendly setup wizard which auto-discovers and imports/indexes messages from Thunderbird, Evolution, KMail, Outlook, Mail.app, GMail ... which also grabs metadata like tags and folder structure.
I do not use Evolution, Outlook, Mail.app, or weird mailbox formats, so if you want features related to them, patches will speed things up a lot.
Note that Mailpile's emphasis is on speed and most of the features above have already basic designs "in my head". Chat with me on freenode (I am BjarniRunar, and hang out on #mailpile) or Twitter if you're interested in my take on how to implement these things. Or just send a pull request! :-)
This is the Mailpile roadmap:
- Write Python prototype for indexing and rapidly searching large volumes of e-mail. Define on-disk data formats.
- Add support for GMail-style conversation threading, tags and filters.
- Give it a very basic, ugly web interface, define an XML-RPC API.
- Look for some HTML/Javascript gurus who want to build a nice UI.
- Iterate until awesome.
- Rewrite search engine (using same data formats and same XML-RPC API) in C. If anyone cares - Python might be good enough.
We have passed milestone 2, with work progressing on 3 and 4.
Bjarni R. Einarsson (http://bre.klaki.net/) created this! If you think it's neat, you should also check out PageKite: https://pagekite.net/
The GMail guys get mad props for creating the best webmail service out there. Wishing the Free Software world had something like it is what inspired me to start working on this.
Contributors:
- Bjarni R. Einasson (http://bre.klaki.net/)
- Smari McCarthy (http://www.smarimccarthy.com/)
- Björgvin Ragnarsson (https://github.com/nifgraup/)
- Brennan Novak (https://brennannovak.com/)
- Halldór Rúnarsson (https://github.com/halldor)
This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.