Reykjavík Grapevine - 16.08.2013, Síða 16

At the OHM Festival 2013 in the Netherlands—a
Burning Man for the tech/intellect inclined—Bjarni
Einarsson, Smári McCarthy, and Brennan Novak
announced the launch of a new Reykjavík-based
project called Mailpile, described on its website as
“a modern, fast web-mail client with user-friendly
encryption and privacy features. 100% Free and
Open Source software.” They have high hopes that
Mailpile will be a more secure, efficient, likely in-
triguing, and empowering improvement on widely
used providers like Gmail and Hotmail.
Innovation in the hot tub
“I’ve been working on Mailpile off and on for two
years. It started as a hobby project, just experiment-
ing with building a search engine for email because
I wanted to figure out how to do that. And once I
had something that was running, that was working,
I discovered that I just really enjoyed working on it
and it sort of progressed from there,” Bjarni says.
“Sometime around January of this year I became
really frustrated and really concerned about privacy
issues online. There had been rumours about the
stuff that Edward Snowden revealed. These ru-
mours have been in the tech community for a very
long time. I was getting frustrated by, in my opinion,
a lack of innovation in email in general and I was
starting to feel like maybe I should turn this project
into more than just a hobby.”
Bjarni was in a hot tub at a Reykjavík pool when
he met Brennan Novak, a young American user
interface designer who took an interest in Bjarni’s
then hobby. “He knows how to make things beauti-
ful and easy to understand. And that’s exactly the
skillset I was lacking to build a product that would
be useful to people,” Bjarni explains. In addition to
Brennan, developer and activist Smári McCarthy
joined the team to provide insight into online pri-
vacy and educating people on how to understand
and use encryption. Helping to develop Mailpile
seems a natural next step for Smári who was re-
cently notified by Google that a United States court
had ordered an extensive classified search of his
Gmail account metadata. “This would never happen
if his email was on his own computer in his own
home, because if they want to access that they have
to come knocking on his door, present him with a
warrant, and talk to him,” Bjarni says.
The Mailpile team’s 100,000 USD goal will go
toward the development of the software. Some of
the funds will be for testing, hiring extra help, and
travelling to conferences, and paying their salary so
that they can focus on the project.
A new normal
The reason why Mailpile could be worth paying at-
tention to is not just because it provides encryption,
though that is a key feature; it’s because Mailpile’s
aim is to create better email overall which, consid-
ering the nature of online communication, should
by default include easy to use privacy options that
make encrypting more normative. “With Thunder-
bird or Outlook, the focus was on creating a pro-
gramme enabling people to read and write email,
and organise it into folders, and then they added
some search capabilities and maybe they’d get a
third party extension to do the encryption,” Bjarni
says. “It just really changes things if you do them as
an afterthought. They don’t work as well. So we’re
taking a very different approach in that respect.”
Mailpile differs from other webmail providers
in that although it looks like a normal website (the
interface is akin to familiar Gmail), it’s not. It’s
software. “It’s going to be confusing to some peo-
ple because they expect a website to be something
that’s somewhere in the cloud or in a data centre
somewhere, but actually it doesn’t need to be,” he
says. Software means that Mailpile is installed on
a personal computer rather than accessed remotely.
“This allows us to leverage [website] technology but
to do so in a way that’s still on your own machine
where all of the data stays under your control.”
What initially sparked Bjarni’s interest in tin-
kering with email was actually building stronger
search engines, so a major feature of Mailpile is a
sophisticated internal search engine. “There’s no
software out there that will make it easy [for people]
to generate reports about their email or visualise
how you’ve been communicating with people in a
fancy way. Because we’re approaching this from
a different angle, it will be easy to do things like
that,” Bjarni says. Mailpile would allow people to
make more directed searches of their email content
and perhaps think differently about the way they
communicate.
Along with privacy and stronger searches, Mail-
pile is designed to be fast and responsive, outper-
forming "the cloud" even on slow computers, as the
project’s site states. “I do make some significant
claims about the performance of Mailpile. It is re-
ally fast, and this is surprising to people because
we’ve sort of been trained to believe that things
that happen in big data centres far away have more
computing power—that shiny data centres must be
better than what we have in our laps, but it turns out
that’s not really true,” Bjarni says. “And the reason
that we then become faster than interacting with
something like Gmail is that the computer is right
in your lap. It’s closer to you.”
Other unique elements of Mailpile are that it is
open source software, which means the code is pub-
lic and anyone can contribute to the project. And,
at the moment, Bjarni thinks that Mailpile won’t
be supplying users with email addresses. Instead
people will be able to use addresses they already
have. “Mailpile will just download your email and
will process it locally instead of it being wherever
it was before,” he explains. Thus, if someone were
to stick with their Gmail account and download it
through Mailpile, they might not get all the security
benefits, but they would be able to easily encrypt
when they felt they needed to. “This may change,”
he said, “but I don’t really want to provide people
with email addresses, because that would make
them dependent on Mailpile in a sense.”
Accessibility
Mailpile has received exceptional financial support
and praise in a very short amount of time, but Bjarni
recognises that the project needs to be approached
in manageable steps. “The real challenge is when
we start adding features for secure communications,
including encryption and digital signatures. These
are things that even skilled computer professionals
have to do their homework on and study before they
can get it right, he says.
“So we have a very ambitious goal of mak-
ing this accessible to non-technical people. That’s
something we’re going to figure out in the next few
months. A big part of the project is just doing the
research, doing some experiments, creating some
mock-ups, having people try them, and iterating un-
til we have something that’s actually useable.”
Pile O’Mail
A closer look at new Reykjavík-based webmail project, Mailpile
by Shea Sweeney
Mailpile’s tech lead, Bjarni Einarsson, was in his apartment giv-
ing an interview the evening of August 7 when donations reached
40,000 USD, less than one week into its campaign on crowdfund-
ing website, IndieGoGo. A week later, as this issue went to print,
Mailpile had raised 74,000 USD nearly reaching it's goal of raising
100,000 USD, and there were still 27 days to go.
Iceland | Tech
I was getting frustrated
by, in my opinion, a
lack of innovation in
email in general and I
was starting to feel like
maybe I should turn
this project into more
than just a hobby.”
“
„
Axel Sigurðarson
RUB23 | Aðalstræti 2 | 101 Reykjavík | Phone: +354 553 5323 | reykjavik@rub23.is
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16The Reykjavík Grapevine Issue 12 — 2013