[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.

[valeryeppie]

This is an important use case. The short answer is yes you can.

[rollcat]

So what do I set my MX record 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.