- 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.
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).