[Freedombox-discuss] Leaving the (proprietary) cloud - my roadmap for FB

[bertagaz]

Hi,

On Fri, Oct 08, 2010 at 02:01:01PM +0200, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 08, 2010 at 12:54:34PM +0200, Arthur Lutz wrote:
>> When I think of the FreedomBox and leaving the cloud, the first thing I 
>> think about migrating is not my email. One of the reasons is that I'm  
>> quite dependent on it and don't really want an adjustment period right  
>> now for this tool. When I think about leaving the cloud, I want to  
>> migrate the least "critical" services first, so I can start trusting my 
>> FB (stability, security use etc.)
>
> Good point.
>
> First I wondered why you then anyway mention "imap + webmail" on your  
> list, but then realized that I actually agree with you - and the key  
> here, I think, is *mirroring*.
>
> When I included imap but not smtp on my list, I forgot to mention that I  
> would then be using offlineimap to mirror emails from the communities  
> and organisations where I have an email account.  Just as I do today on  
> my laptop.

Offlineimap or getmail would be a nice start for the big email thing.

As it comes up again, I'd like to submit an idea we had with friends when
talking about this issue. 

IIRC the last "distributed email" discussion on this list ended up on the
problem of having a reliable smtp server on a box that might not be always
online. As it was spotted, SMTP supports this case by having the ability
to have secondaries MX, but then the problem was to store data on this
(probably untrusty) MX.

Now if the problem is to store our emails on other boxes hosting our
secondaries MX, maybe a easy workaround might be to have the sender SMTP
automatically encrypting outgoing mails with gnupg. Each box might have
a dedicated gnupg key which the user has control on (this is not foolish
if we consider using monkeysphere on the freedombox), distributed on the
keyserver pool, that SMTP servers can fetch before sending emails. 

Actually the monkeysphere project is also developping an outgoing SMTP
proxy which would be used by other SMTP to plug with monkeysphere, so that
x509 certificates can be verified by SMTP servers using monkeysphere.
Shouldn't be too hard to add the ability to encrypt outgoing emails on the
fly.

So every user email that would end up on a secondary MX would be already
encrypted with gnupg. We could do that even for outgoing emails send to
the primary MX, that would also be a way to have more gnupg usage in
emails. And that way, stored emails would always be encrypted, then even
easiest to backup in this (already) encrypted form.

That might be a way to have distributed SMTP, and that would probably be a
good thing to have this kind of feature in debian anyway :).

But I guess it has a dependency on the other DNS discussion ;)

>> * delicious -> ?
>
> If using YaCy for search, then that includes some shareable bookmark  
> tools, it seems.

I know of scuttle, which sadly is php.

>
>> * google search -> yacy
>
> Please file RFP bugreport against WNPP for it.
>
> Also, beware that YaCy is Java-based, so heavy on the limited resources  
> of an embedded device.
>
> Complex volunteer task: Write a C/C++/Erlang implementation of YaCy ;-)

there is also the seeks project : http://www.seeks-project.info/site/
"free and open P2P design and application for enabling social websearch"

>> Hope this helps, if people think it's relevant, maybe we can start
>> documenting these equivalents (and the migration documentation?) on
>> the wiki.
>
> Please do!

I'll do some wiki too, I feel that it isn't synced with the discussions
over here, and this project is laking of an updated wiki, to find ways to
organize the work. Speaking of that, the organisation of this project is
really unclear, and it's probably a bad thing to start it really.

Bert.