One of the things #Mailpile never did well, was processing bounces and other delivery status notifications (DSNs).
I am currently being side-tracked from what I was working on (sending mail), to add the features #moggie needs to do better.
As a start, I just want to recognize the DSN as part of the thread, the error is a reply to the message. Once the two are linked in this way, I can iterate on how they are presented in the UI.
Mutt doesn't appear to do even this much. Do other mail clients?
Watching #moggie copy e-mails out of my old encrypted #Mailpile storage, into a shiny new Maildir-in-a-ZIP is really very satisfying.
It would be nice if it were faster, but in practice this will be such a rare operation that it's probably not worth optimizing. At least not yet!
If I create a relatively simple command that replicates the tags from #Mailpile into a new #moggie setup, then my migration toolchain will be complete!
I moved back to Iceland from the UK a couple of months ago. Am in the UK for a few days, visiting, in our old flat.
There is a parcel! With my name on it! An EE WiFi hub and some other gadget as well? I didn't order this. Called EE - they have no record of sending this, no account in my name. They told me to bin it.
If this were 2014, when #Mailpile was hot shit and #Snowden's revelations all the news and there were [maybe] spies at our community cons, I'd be VERY suspicious right about now...
Folks, I am exploring webmail clients for my personal use.
My first preference was Mailpile (https://www.mailpile.is/) but it's still under development.
Something similar with OpenPGP support would be great. What are you using?
In #Mailpile v1, I one of the bits of code I spent the most time on, was exactly that - the TLS validation system.
At the time (it has improved since), Python's standard libraries made it almost impossible to make secure outgoing connections.
And TLS issues were hard to troubleshot. And because we had Opinions(tm), we wanted to sometimes use a TOFU policy for certs, and CA-based security at others. And sometimes we wanted to connect over Tor. But not always.
Thus: the Connection Broker. (2/n)
I've been having a random brainwave today, which I am going to sleep on for weeks (probably months) before I take action.
For #Mailpile v1, we were adamant that we would never provide a hosted service. For good reasons!
I find myself reconsidering, for two reasons:
1. Not everyone wants to host their own software
2. I think I've figured out how to do this in a way that doesn't harm user freedoms
Security does suffer. But how much? Dunno, I need to mull it over. Feel free to object!
It is very easy to write code that *usually* works with an mbox file.
It is surprisingly tricky to write code that *reliably* works with an #mbox file.
Almost impossible, actually, since there are multiple incompatible variants of the format.
I keep coming back to this code and finding new problems with it. That is a good thing, I guess? Making progress...
https://github.com/mailpile/Mailpile
#mailpile coming back
I've been helping friend these past few days, as they struggle to get #Mailpile v1 to do their bidding. To be honest, the jury is still out on whether we succeed or throw in the towel.
So many things are just broken!
I'd like to blame bit-rot, but honestly, the design was just wrong in too many places. And at the same time, I keep coming across little things that were also really well done.
Weird feeling. Pride and shame all jumbled together. Glorious mistakes and cringe victories.
@HerraBRE Really cool! Very excited maybe one day hosting mails with https://github.com/mjl-/mox and reading them with #mailpile <3
I just published a new blog post on the #Mailpile website, discussing the grant we are getting from #NLNet and what we are going to do with the money: https://www.mailpile.is/blog/2023-05-01_A_Mail_Client_in_Six_Steps.html
The tl;dr is that we are bringing #moggie from "a thing Bjarni hacks on as often as he can", to "a new terminal mode e-mail client which people should be able to use."
I'm pretty excited about this!
This morning I taught `moggie email` to generate e-mails with protected headers, as described in this Internet Draft (co-authored by yours truly):
https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-autocrypt-lamps-protected-headers-02.html
This extends PGP/MIME signatures to cover important message headers, and optionally allows header encryption, including the Subject in particular.
Progress!
It's kinda fun when you need some sample data, and you know that there is an Internet Draft with your name on it, that contains exactly what you need...
https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-bre-openpgp-samples-01.html
Installing the old #mailpile v1 has become more and more difficult. This is kinda OK, as development there has halted and I don't want new users on that code-base...
But it's also really not OK for those who want to examine Mailpile v1 or worse, have old Mailpile data lying around which they now have trouble accessing.
So today I built and published #Docker images which make it easy to run Mailpile v1 on a modern distro: https://github.com/mailpile/Mailpile-v1-Docker
Feedback is welcome!
Did you give #Mailpile a try?
https://www.mailpile.is/
It has been a good, geeky work-week so far. Not much tootin' been busy.
I did some #devops twiddling for #pagekite. Yay SSL certs?
Made more progress on grant applications for #Mailpile.
Studied #Matter (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter_(standard) ) a bit, within the context of #esp32 and #micropython development.
I also had multiple naps and stared out the window a lot going HMM.
Now it's time for another window gazing session, before I dive back into #moggie related #OpenPGP work...
Feeling vaguely proud of the old #Mailpile v1 bayesian #spam filter, which successfully showed me my legit #email from DHL last week, while still sending all the DHL-themed #phishing straight to spam.
This is without using any DNS based blacklists or anything of that nature, just pure content analysis.
Generating keywords that represent message structure and other such things, to better train the spam filter, is one of the more interesting parts of this project. It's fun to see it work!
