[Freedombox-discuss] Email on the FreedomBox Discussion

[Bjarni Rúnar Einarsson]

On Wed, Aug 24, 2011 at 6:19 AM, John Walsh <fiftyfour at waldevin.com> wrote:
> Hi Everybody,
>
> <bdale> dogstar: to me, 'email' means smtp, et al .. however, vasile will
> attest that I've mentioned several times that to do something truly
> distributed and secure, we need to think more in terms of messaging other
> than smtp
> <bdale> fiftyfour: configuring an smtp+imap email service could be done in
> lots of ways, none of which directly align with or promote many of the
> desired attributes of a freedombox. so, exactly what additional value we can
> or should add to the email experience of a given user is a topic where I
> think some research and discussion would be good
...
>
> First of all, I would be gratefully if somebody could explain how an
> smtp+imap email service does not align or promote many of the desired
> attributes of a FBX?

I personally would consider a good e-mail, and especially *webmail*
experience to be a very valuable addition to the FreedomBox.  I would
like to break my GMail habit, but the availability and user interface
make that hard.  A FreedomBox which stored my e-mail, but allowed me
webmail access from outside when I am on the go would be very awesome.

I spent 6 years writing and running a spam/virus filter service for
e-mail, and before that I ran an ISP's e-mail infrastructure, so I
have some insight into how this all fits together, although it might
be a little dated by now - corrections are very welcome.

Here are my takes on what makes SMTP e-mail a hard and/or a poor fit
for the FreedomBox, in order of severity:

   1. The FreedomBox reference plug will have very limited storage
space: e-mail accumulates unless you make people download and delete
from server (which means no webmail).

   2. Spam has made it common practice to reject and block direct SMTP
communication from non-ISP-run servers.  Machines on home
DSL/Cable/... lines will have much difficulty getting their mail
delivered and will effectively be dependent on ISP mail servers for
delivery. ISPs also often filter incoming SMTP, making people
dependent on ISP servers for receiving mail as well.  Configuring the
box to match each ISP's settings will rapidly become a messy usability
problem.

   3. People who currently depend on their ISPs for e-mail (instead of
using a cloud service like GMail) usually download their e-mail
anyway, so from a privacy/control point of view, adding the FreedomBox
as an extra hop (note the e-mail will still have to go through the ISP
servers because of 2.) provides little real value unless it does funky
things like automatic opportunistic GPG encryption/decryption, which
might be a bad idea anyway for security reasons. So attempting to
replace ISP services has little real-world benefit - but replacing the
webmail providers would be a massive improvement.

   4. Aside from storage, replacing the webmail providers is a UI
problem.  If our UI is much worse than GMail's, people won't want to
switch.  If we are focusing on what exists today, it's entirely
possible that there is no existing free software that can really do
the job. Off the top of my head, these are the ones I remember and my
opinion on them:

   - Squirrelmail - ancient, with an inferior UI
   - RoundCube - looks fancy, not sure how good it really is
   - Zimbra - fancy, modern... bloated. Nowhere near as nice as GMail.

Zimbra might be worth considering for the FreedomBox, as it would
provide e-mail and calendaring and such, and it's being actively
improved.  Maybe someday it will get close to matching GMail's
usability. :-)

Storage and overall horsepower of the plug server remain an issue.
It's annoyingly distributed under a custom license (the ZPL), but
according to Wikipedia the FSF has given it the green light.

-- 
Bjarni R. Einarsson
Founder, lead developer of PageKite.

Make localhost servers visible to the world: http://pagekite.net