I've spoken to one of the Mailpile guys on twitter, and his answer was that they're trying to improve adoption and implementation of existing standards, before they look at improving transports.
Giving their timescales are already measured in years, I don't think Mailpile will significantly change the game. Kudos to them, but they'll just be Yet Another Commercial Pseudo-Secure-Email Seller.
I agree that the problems are inherent in the protocol. Ideally I'd like messages to have exactly one cleartext field - "To" - and servers to be dumb async routers communicating over encrypted channels. Make it computationally expensive, I don't mind: it will send us back to '90s-style "wait for POP download" timeouts, but if it's the price for half-decent security, I'll pay it.
Jk, the main difference is that mailpile wants to be fully web-based, whereas Enigmail is a fat client. I guess they plan on working heavily on key generation and storage (which is typically the sore point in tools like Enigmail).
Giving their timescales are already measured in years, I don't think Mailpile will significantly change the game. Kudos to them, but they'll just be Yet Another Commercial Pseudo-Secure-Email Seller.
I agree that the problems are inherent in the protocol. Ideally I'd like messages to have exactly one cleartext field - "To" - and servers to be dumb async routers communicating over encrypted channels. Make it computationally expensive, I don't mind: it will send us back to '90s-style "wait for POP download" timeouts, but if it's the price for half-decent security, I'll pay it.