Just come across this. Haven’t dug too deep but sounds like an interesting opportunity. I think it can only succeed if it is fully compliant with current systems. Seems to only be mobile clients. No desktop? Are big tech going to permit this to grow? It would shut down a data mining opportunity …
Email is already open and fully distributed.
The fact that most people gravitate to a few large providers isn’t really related to email as a system IMO.
The big email providers will send all of your mail to spam if you selfhost it though.
It depends a lot on IP reputation, but that can definitely be an issue.
Yes, can be an issue. But if you set it up right, use dkim/dmarc/SPF, and don’t do stupid things like spam people, you’re good. It isnt hard. It is just hard getting a static IP for a homelab, really.
That’s not the issue, it’s that it’s not e2e encrypted automatically although other people like proton and tuta already do this you have to use there sergers, with openmail you can self-host or use third party servers. It does feel a bit like this situation though:
Right now the only way to host this is with cloudflare workers 😅 Until the go implementation is done I doubt anyone but them will run this.
“Soon even on your own domain.” This smells like bluesky, hopefully it’s not an empty promise this time.
What do they offer?? An alternative to email that isn’t standard, not based in open and standard protocols like IMAP/SMPT at all and is incompatible with everything else out there that FYI is distributed. So this is basically another attempt at emulating Proton’s success and making email effetely less standardized. lol
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With Mail/HTTPS, self-hosting email is as simple as running a website.
That sounds amazing!
I’m all for software that greatens our ability to selfhost. I’ve heard it’s very hard to host email. If open email delivers on this, it might just have what it takes to survive.
I’ll say this much, the sign up was super easy. Only need your name and a hook to create an account.
Ok that makes it so much better for me.
Its not difficult to self host email. Ispconfig will do all the work for you locally, then you just need to set up your DNS records. The difficult part is staying on top of patching and block lists.
email fans are like:
Email is an open protocol and therefore we dont need this.
Openness doesn’t mean flawless. Openness doesn’t mean it is good. The protocol of BlueSky is open, but gives only the mighty the ability to take ownership.
I don’t know why they think email is good enough, it must be something irrational.
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Email is distributed.
It is certainly not distributed. Today it is a mix of oligopoly and decentralized. If it was distributed, it would be as easy to host an email service as it is to own a phone. Entirely possible, but not the reality of today.
Tuta wasn’t able to succeed and therefore this is not going to succeed.
Just because somebody has failed before, doesn’t mean it can’t be done.
They are targeting the tinfoil hat people.
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People don’t care.
If you say this, then you are out of the discussion. Let adults speak instead.
A comment section full of strawmen.
If you are going to criticize this project, you need to criticize how they present their ideas. Perhaps you disagree how they portray email. Then you can say something like, “it is not an issue that a few corporation host most of the emails of the world.” You can say “A significant amount of funding comes from xxx and this compromizes their integrity.” You could say “Open email sais that their protocol is private, but why do they not implement superduper encryption”.
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whitelist only email means you’re reading your spam folder to find addresses to whitelist, you’re reading the spam. or more realistically, you don’t, you miss legit messages, you don’t make connections with strangers and that’s the end of that.
Instead the spaminess of each message should be visually graded with colored tags indicating certainty of the spaminess, this is “graylisting” or more specifically “shades of gray” listing
Where is the RFC describing the new protocol?
Who is RFC?
Was about to try it but then it won’t open without Google play services, I use aurora store.
Looks cute - internally it sounds like XMPP rosters if we imagine all mail messages/attachments are pulled too.
Some issues at a glance
- no display names is a good thing - but then “name is retrieved from their public profile” does not sound very good
- ascii for local usernames will probably annoy a lot of people, maybe we should just remove the letters and just issue people numbers (i’m not being sarcastic)
- disallowing IP addresses in the remote part by definition sounds unnecessary
I think there are some gaps on the notification side of things - the agent not being able to verify them (and maybe dropping) or conversely accepting notifications that it should not.
What really puts me off here is the unnecessary use of HTTP .e.g discovery moves from DNS to well known file (webfinger?). Not sure what the benefit is, but ok. And the use of a novel authentication scheme makes me nervous.
It was a nice read and I agree with the point that making this pull based helps. But I wish it did not try to invent so much in one go
