[alistproducer2]

I just started the Free Data Foundation. The goal of the project is to support OSS that can replace "free" services that subsist on our data. Interestingly enough the maiden project is tentatively called Tmail (short for torrent mail).

It works somewhat like TOR in that it will depend on volunteers to host nodes that will communicate with existing email providers (outlook, gmail, yahoo, etc). The reason we need these nodes is that it's practically impossible to host an email server at a residential location because ISP's block port 25. Also most people don't have the desire or knowledge to maintain an email server.

Users can host their own delivery nodes (which will be plug and play software pre-installed on RPi's). These nodes communicate with the volunteer's host nodes over 80, thereby bypassing the ISP block of port 25.

There will also be an option for people hosting delivery nodes to share their resource with people who can't/won't host their own nodes which will allow people to sign up for email accounts without running their own software (a la gmail).

It gets way deeper than that, but I'll leave it there. You can follow the project at https://github.com/freedatafound/. I've also bought http://freedatafoundation.org but there's currently nothing there.

[voaie]

Something like Mail2Tor@onion?

[alistproducer2]

No, it's not designed to be anonymous (although it will force encryption). The goal is to provide a free, community hosted email service to regular non-technical users.

It is similar to TOR in the sense that it will rely on volunteers to host nodes and/or relays. The goals of TMail and TOR are, however, fundamentally different.