Mailpile is an Iceland-based free/open source email service that's privacy oriented, integrating easy-to-use encryption and scalable searching. The idea is to produce something that'll run well as a cloud-based service or on your own desktop. They want to ship their first milestone in January 2014, and are looking to raise $100K on Indi-egogo to pay for the developer hours to see the project through. With the Mozilla foundation abandoning support for my beloved (but creaky) Thunderbird, I'm very interested in seeing what they come up with, and I've put my money where my mouth is, with a $128 donation. I'm especially impressed by their determination to integrate easy-to-use mail crypto — the holy grail of email for decades now.

* A modern, open source web-mail application which runs well either on a personal computer or in the cloud

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An intuitive, beautiful user interface that is a joy to use

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User-friendly support for both OpenPGP and S/MIME encryption and signatures

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A very fast, scalable search engine

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Internationalization support, so Mailpile can speak your language

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Sensible defaults that improve your workflow and help you handle incoming mail

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A platform developers can customize and build upon, including a plugin architecture, support for themes and alternate user interfaces and of course good documentation

Mailpile – taking e-mail back

(via /.)