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Welcome to Moggie!

Moggie might become Mailpile 2.0 - a Python 3 rewrite of the original Mailpile (https://www.mailpile.is/).

A fast, secure e-mail client? Someday!

Project status

Issue #1 tracks progress and gives a rough idea of what is planned.

I am writing a series of blog posts about this project.

Contributing

For now, please don't?

This project is in "quiet mode" (not quite stealth), because I want to get it to a certain level of maturity before I engage with users, testers and other developers. The only feedback I'm interested in at the moment is positive "wow that's awesome!" reinforcement. Which may not be justified just yet. ;-)

The work is published here in case I get hit by a bus, and so the Mailpile community (who directly and indirectly funded my work) can see what I am up to.

Architectural overview

Moggie currently masquerades as a "TUI" (text-(G)UI) app, but behind the scenes it is a collection of microservices using HTTP-based RPC calls to talk to each other. There are microservices for the search engine, the metadata store, filesystem operations, PGP operations, and IMAP connections. A master "application logic" process implements an API and is responsible for coordination and access controls.

Moggie "clients" send one-off HTTP requests, or establish a longer lived websocket to the "app" worker. The plan is for Moggie to support a web user interface (like Mailpile), and integrate PageKite for easy remote access and collaboration.

Structured data is stored on disk using binary records, most of which is AES encrypted. Moggie's native "mailbox" format is a ZIP archive containing a Maildir directory structure, which may be AES encrypted and/or compressed. Moggie's encryption keys are currently left in the clear in the config file until I've figured out the UX and integrated Passcrow for password recovery.

Hacking Micro-Howto

First, brace yourself for nothing working: see Project Status above.

Install Moggie on recent Debian:

  1. apt install git python3-{numpy,cryptography,pycryptodome,urwid,msgpack} python3-{appdirs,setproctitle,pyqrcode,packaging} python3-{aiosmtplib,aiodns,dkim,pgpy,pgpdump,markdown}
  2. git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/mailpile/moggie

Install Moggie on Raspbian 11:

  1. apt install git python3-{numpy,cryptography,pycryptodome,urwid,msgpack} python3-{appdirs,setproctitle,pyqrcode,packaging} python3-{pip,aiodns,dkim,pgpy,pgpdump,markdown}
  2. python3 -m pip install aiosmtplib
  3. git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/mailpile/moggie

This also works for the latest Ubuntu, but you will need to give scary sounding arguments to pip. Using the hybrid virtualenv method discussed below, instead of system-wide pip, may be a better approach.

Or, if you use nix:

  1. nix-shell -p python3Packages.{numpy,cryptography,pycryptodomex,urwid} python3Packages.{appdirs,setproctitle,pyqrcode,packaging} python3Packages.{aiosmtplib,aiodns,dkimpy,pgpy,pgpdump} python3Packages.{markdown,msgpack} openssl git
  2. git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/mailpile/moggie

Or, if you prefer a virtualenv:

  1. git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/mailpile/moggie
  2. cd moggie
  3. python3 -m venv --system-site-packages .venv
  4. source .venv/bin/activate
  5. python3 -m pip install -r requirements.txt

Run the tests:

  • python3 -W ignore:ResourceWarning -m unittest

(Note that the virtualenv method is somewhat prone to failure, since many of moggie's dependencies are tricky to build from source. A hybrid approach where as much is installed using the OS package manager as possible, and pip only used for missing packages may be more likely to succeed.)

Next, grab some e-mail to play with, in Maildir or mbox format. For example, browse around https://lists.apache.org/ and download monthly archives, e.g. dev@age.apache.org for 2022-01.

Play with Moggie:

# The following commands run from the root of the git repo
cd /path/to/moggie

# Read some instructions
python3 -m moggie help

# Read some mail using Moggie:
python3 -m moggie -f /path/to/archive.mbox

# Or browse an IMAP account
python3 -m moggie -y -f imap://user@domain@imap.example.org/

# Start the Moggie background process/server
python3 -m moggie start

# Import mail into Moggie:
python3 -m moggie import /path/to/archive.mbox

(... wait a bit, check top to see if Moggie is busy ...)

# Stop the Moggie background process
python3 -m moggie stop

Moggie will write data to ~/.local/share/Moggie/default.

You will probably want to delete that folder now and then, or at least the contents of the various subdirectories, since the format of Moggie's on-disk data structures is still in flux and obsolete data may cause weird issues.

The data includes logs (in the subdirectory named logs) which may be useful for debugging. Be warned it may also leak your secrets if you increase the logging verbosity. There is also a config.rc.

Credits and License

Bjarni R. Einarsson (https://bre.klaki.net/) is currently the sole developer of Moggie.

Moggie development is funded in part through the NGI0 Entrust Fund, a fund established by NLnet with financial support from the European Commission's Next Generation Internet programme. Thank you!

Moggie is built on the work of the Mailpile community, in particular:

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation. See the file COPYING.md for details.