[Freedombox-discuss] Email on the FreedomBox Discussion

[Jonas Smedegaard]

On 11-08-24 at 04:19pm, John Walsh wrote:
> <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
>  
> The FreedomBox (FBX) IRC Chat on the 2011-08-15 15:00UTC raised the
> possibility that the FBX will not have email. This is the discussion that
> bdale requested.
>  
> I am a user who wants my email on my FBX rather than my ISP's server

I very much agree with the standpoint of Bdale.  An important detail is 
that Bdale also mentioned - which you did not quote above, that he was 
happy if others spent time actually looking into a way email could 
reasonably be handled on a FreedomBox.


[good examples on email in widespread use today snipped]

Indeed email is in widespread use today.  As is centralized social 
networking and centralized search.

FreedomBox will not prevent you from continuing to use those services.

Would be cool if turning on a FreedomBox would magically fix all the 
flaws of our current use of internet without the user or the surrounding 
peers needing to change habits.  I do *not* claim that to be impossible, 
but I dare say that it is very VERY hard to achieve - so hard that to me 
it belongs at our "dreams department", i.e quite valuable to work on but 
not expected any results from any time soon if ever.


> My primary applications are browser, email and a word-processor. Every 
> PC comes with these applications pre-installed, but they do not come 
> with an XMPP or SIP clients.

Apple computers do ship with XMPP support preinstalled.

FreedomBox can easily provide a web-based XMPP client for those not able 
or willing to install additional software on their computers.

I would want to encourage users to install a "real2 XMPP client: I 
believe that only for rather peculiar hardware do no native XMPP client 
exist, and I generally expect native tools more efficient than web-based 
ones. I would be happy to be proved wrong! :-)


> 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 make a living as a systems administrator for a few places, including a 
small business university.  At that business university I noticed a few 
years back that less than 1% of received email was legitimate.  I do 
reject most possible email "at the gates", but still more than 99% of 
the emails that enter through and is applied the relatively expensive 
content-based scanning, turn out to be spam.

Both the routines to reject "at the gates" and to scan content rely 
heavily on external, constantly updated databases.  Centralized ones.

My point is, that my mail servers depend on centralized pieces to manage 
email and still needs to spend a noticable amount of resources locally.

I would be very interested in concrete proposals for improved email 
handling.  If working solutions are found that a) rely less on 
centralized services and b) use less resources, then we can apply those 
generally to existing mail servers throughout the globe - and consider 
installing on FreedomBox as well.



> Secondly, for me webmail/email is a mature application so I don't 
> understand why the FBX has to add additional value to the email 
> experience? Facebook's messaging application is basically email by 
> another name.

Facebook has several kinds of messaging:

  * Chat-like messaging
  * Mail-like messaging

The chat-like messaging in Facebook uses XMPP: you can in fact exchange 
messages with Facebook friends using ichat or other Jabber clients 
without even having your web browser open.

The mail-like messaging does not accept external messages, so need not 
deal with spam.

FreedomBox can easily provide a similarly crippled mail system.  
Challenge is in interacting sensibly with the outside World.



> AFAICT, Friendika (distributed social networking software) requires an 
> IMAP server (Friendika settings) for their messaging application.

Yes, imap is the easy part. smtp is the hard part ;-)


Kind regards,

 - Jonas

-- 
 * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt
 * Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/

 [x] quote me freely  [ ] ask before reusing  [ ] keep private
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