Eppie is a decentralized email with full address and account ownership
eppie.io
eppie.io
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.
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 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).
- 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)
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.
Google defederated their XMPP infrastructure. Do you think they wouldn't do the same with GMail, if they could afford to?
Do I have to run my own node - on a server in my basement, or on a VPS?
Do I have to trust your infrastructure?
Do I have to go through another, existing provider?
I'm trying to get a simple answer to these questions since my original post.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Here are the main features:
Creating an account in a decentralized network.
Full support for classic email + Proton Mail.
Decentralized messages.
Migration of the old mailbox to web3.
Built-in identity manager.
Ability to use Ethereum addresses.
We are also preparing a website update.
You can read more on features here: https://explorer.gitcoin.co/#/round/10/0x8de918f0163b2021839...
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?
ProtonMail integration demo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkkGY5V0QLw
It is creating a second copy of all my email data on your cluster? For what benefit?
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.
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.