Protecting Your Privacy

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 "prefs.gpg_recipient = [email protected]"

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 "prefs.obfuscate_index = Some RaNdoM LongISH 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!