[rollcat]

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.

[valeryeppie]

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.

[ghusto]

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.

[valeryeppie]

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.

[rollcat]

> 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).

[valeryeppie]

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)

[TheNewsIsHere]

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.

[valeryeppie]

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.

[rollcat]

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?

[valeryeppie]

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.

[rollcat]

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.