Email is already decentralised. A domain costs a few bucks per year. You can point the MX records at any IP address you control. There's half a dozen decent mail systems you can self-host. Everything up to this point is trivial and things like IPFS only complicate this.
The hard part is making sure your emails get thru to your recipients, and fighting off the spammers on your end. I'm very much interested in how they're going to tackle this.
There aren’t too many people capable of jumping through all the hoops, but yes, if you go as far as self-hosting your email, your data is under your control, not Google’s. The address though is still not yours.
What do you mean by “Email is already decentralized”? Global email network is a Federation, and it’s a good thing. But as a user of email provider you are a client to a server in a centralized network. Eppie is “more decentralized” because it is a p2p network, there are no servers.
As for fighting spammers, the problem is there, it is not our main priority, but in Eppie you can generate as many addresses as you want. The user controls whether to make an address public or share it only with trusted contacts. And Whitelist is also in our backlog.
I'll only tackle the two points in your comment nobody's seemed to bother with yet:
> There aren’t too many people capable of jumping through all the hoops
The people who would be willing to put effort into trying Eppie out, are the same that will put effort into setting up (what is nowadays the trivial task of) setting up a mail server. Guess which one they'll pick? Hint: It's the one which works with all the other mail servers on the planet.
> but yes, if you go as far as self-hosting your email, your data is under your control, not Google’s. The address though is still not yours.
If you mean in so much as the domain you've registered could be taken away from you, then, I guess? How likely is that? The bloody _piratebay.org_ is still up and running.
These are valid considerations, we do keep them in mind. But we still hope to the majority of users setting up Eppie is much easier compared to private mail server. But hey, would you subscribe for early access to see for yourself?
Domain names are indeed unlikely to be taken away. But Eppie provides you the actual cryptographically guaranteed ownership of your address and data. For a considerable number of internet users this is enough of a reason to give it a try. These are our early adopters, and then we'll see where it gets us.
> What do you mean by “Email is already decentralized”?
I can run my own email server in my basement, or on a VPS.
> But as a user of email provider you are a client to a server in a centralized network.
If I use my own email server, the network is only as centralised as the server itself; there's also nothing stopping me from hosting a second server on the other side of the planet, and using e.g. CockroachDB as the storage backend.
> Eppie is “more decentralized” because it is a p2p network, there are no servers.
What do I point my MX records at, then?
> in Eppie you can generate as many addresses as you want.
This strategy comes with its own shortcomings, and while it's a useful feature, it is not a be-all-end-all. There was a blog post which I can't find now, of some guy who had used it for something like a decade, detailing everything that went wrong with it: you need to keep track of which email you used where; people get confused which address to use to write you; once you decide to have a "primary" address, "for humans only", the scheme is more or less defeated as you can no longer afford to throw it away, etc.
Don't get me wrong - it's very useful to have this, and I think it should be a standard offering from any and every provider. Just like GMail made GB+ of storage space the standard, addresses are in fact cheap. But that doesn't end spam.
> And Whitelist is also in our backlog.
I'm actually more interested in the complementary problem. How do you plan to address deliverability from your end? As I said, self-hosting an email server today is trivial, compared to the effort in ensuring your email doesn't get rejected by @gmail.com, @outlook.com, @yahoo.com, etc. Which is the core reason why email tends to be more centralised nowadays (even if the underlying protocol and infrastructure supports and encourages federation/decentralisation).
You are correct with regard to traditional email. Eppie is a next generation technology, it is only partially compatible by means of these features:
- One-way gateway from the conventional email to our decentralized network. So you can still receive emails from conventional email to your decentralized address.
- Eppie can work as a client to conventional email when you need it.
- Eppie can use conventional email addresses for decentralized message delivery, so no data lands on any server (both participants must be Eppie users)
So, does that mean that Eppie explicitly cannot (at this time) send email _out_ to the “conventional” email world?
If I would need to use Eppie as a client to a third party email service to send email out to the general world, it makes adoption a very hard sell indeed.
We never intended to have this functionality. If a user wants to put their message to some server, they have normal email. Everyone has it, and everyone will keep using it in the near future. Let’s say we added a convenience to use one client app for both conventional and decentralized emails.
You will have to reconsider your stance on interoperability with existing email infrastructure. This is a network effect that you are not equipped to ignore.
Google defederated their XMPP infrastructure. Do you think they wouldn't do the same with GMail, if they could afford to?
Full interoperability at this point is impossible without compromising our core feature. But there are millions of users already using this kind of technology, and we believe the decentralized ecosystem and the demand will be growing. And we try our best to make the transition easy.
Millions of users using "this kind of" technology does not validate the premise of defederating from regular email. Can you use this to sign up for Netflix? Facebook? Reddit? Discord? Every time you said "no", you've lost 99% of the previously remaining potential audience.
To create a gateway on your domain, you should run your own Eppie node and set MX record to point to that node. Otherwise, there’s no MX record. It’s a p2p trustless network
> Do I have to run my own node - on a server in my basement, or on a VPS?
Yes, as soon as Eppie is launched.
> Do I have to trust your infrastructure?
Eppie is a trustless network. All nodes are equal. So, no, you don’t have to trust it. Take a look at our GitHub: https://github.com/Eppie-io
> Do I have to go through another, existing provider?
No you don’t.
> I'm trying to get a simple answer to these questions since my original post.
We appreciate your willingness to get to the bottom of it.
What are its features? I did not see that on the webpage. Does it for example offer perfect anonymity even to network attackers, on a similar level BitMessage [0] provides?
Eppie’s addressees are pseudo-anonymous. That is a user keeps their anonymity as long as they don’t use same address for different correspondents and don’t allow an address to be associated with other services in a Public Registry.
At this stage of development, we are not planning to build our own anonymous network, but Eppie will allow users to utilize existing technologies, like Tor and I2P, or configure a proxy server to anonymize their Eppie traffic.
Eppie can use conventional email as a name service: so you send a message to Gmail address, but it never lands on the server and goes straight to the decentralized network.
feature
work without a central name managing server?
You create your account in the decentralized Eppie network aka web3 email, where you can transfer your old mailboxes along with all your contacts, emails, attachments, etc., while using your old addresses to communicate. From this moment on, your account and data are unblockable, untrackable, uncensored.
I think this statement might convey a false sense of privacy. New incoming and outgoing messages that go through your old addresses can still be tracked, blocked, etc. If I understand correctly, the p2p aspect is only at play when sending emails to others on the eppie network. Otherwise, they go through whatever external mailbox is linked to the account.
Phrasing is important. There are few different pieces of functionality we are talking about here:
1. Eppie is a client to a p2p network based on its own protocol for decentralized messaging between Eppie users.
2. Eppie can also work as a conventional IMAP/SMTP email client. Obviously, you need to connect your centralized email account.
3. While doing so, you can optionally choose to move your data from that server to Eppie. Whether that email provider actually removes it from its storage is not under our control.
4. You can also use conventional email addresses for decentralized messaging. For this to work both users need to be Eppie clients.
5. When you message some user@email.com and they are not using Eppie, your message is sent over a traditional email network and does land on provider’s server, in which case it won’t be private anymore.
So if I hook up my gmail account to this service, and I send an email via Eppie to my mom's outlook.com email, the outbound Sent Item won't show up in my gmail Sent Items folder?
Well, yes it is. We started with an idea, built a prototype, and came to this startup community to find some guidance hopefully. We are planning an Open Beta in a few months.
Russian is commonly used in a few countries where email privacy is literally a life-saver. It is also our native. The team is originally from Belarus. We know these things by experience.
With time we’re going to add more languages.
The beauty of trustless network is that nobody has to trust anybody. The codebase is open on Github https://github.com/Eppie-io and we are conducting independent security audit at launch.
The hard part is making sure your emails get thru to your recipients, and fighting off the spammers on your end. I'm very much interested in how they're going to tackle this.