Getting started

Note: Mailpile is currently only released in source form, from our Github repository.

Quickstart

The quickest way to get up and running, is to follow one of the following guides:

• Getting started on Linux
• Getting started on MacOS
• Getting started on Windows

When that is done, the following guides will help you configure the software and get started using it:

• Configuring Mailpile
• Indexing Mail
  • Synchronizing Mailpile with Thunderbird
• Using Mailpile
  • Using the Web Interface
• Protecting Your Privacy
• Hacking and Exploring
• Mailpile's Performance

If you are using some other operating system or are a developer who prefers Docker, Virtualenv or PIP to the above recipes, please read on...

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Details for Developers

If you are using some other operating system you are on your own, but the following general guidelines may be of use.

Requirements

• Python 2.7
• python-imaging 1.1.7
• python-lxml 2.3.2
• python-jinja2 2.6
• spambayes 1.1a6

You will also need a tool which can download your e-mail and store in one of the following formats:

• Unix mbox
• Unix Maildir
• Windows Maildir
• Mac Mail.app format
• GMVault

Using PIP Install

If you're the kind of Python dev who prefers to stay in the Python universe, the PIP tool can be used to install the required packages:

$ pip install -r requirements.txt

Note that this requires having a functioning C development environment and sometimes lxml can be a bit tricky to install. For Debian-based distributions, the required development libraries can be installed like so:

$ sudo apt-get install libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev

as per this Stack Overflow answer.

Developing using virtualenv

The Makefile includes a recipe for setting up a virtualenv for use with Mailpile:

$ make virtualenv
$ source mp-virtualenv/bin/activate
$ mailpile

This allows easy, sandboxed usage.

Developing using docker

You can build a docker image:

$ docker build -t mailpile scripts/docker/

and run it:

$ docker run -i -t -p 33411:33411 mailpile

or enter the container's bash prompt directly:

$ docker run -i -t mailpile bash

Installing on Raspberry Pi

Users have reported running into a problem when running make when building the Alpha on Raspberry Pi. Once you get to installing therubyracer it might fail due to a problem with libv8. Run the following:

$ gem install libv8 -- --with-system-v8