[Freedombox-discuss] Independent email services

[Anthony Papillion]

Ever since hearing a talk by RMS about the dangers of the cloud I've
been looking for ways to get out and to help others interested in
getting out to do so. That desire is ultimately what lead me to this
project and I'm excited to see the sheer force of excitement and
involvement everyone here has.

A few months ago, I began thinking small and designing my own project
that focused on replacing the Google services. The idea was similar to
the Freedom Box but on a much smaller level.  One thing I ran into
problems with was email and I'd like to see how the Freedom Box
community is thinking about dealing with this.

Asking everyone to run their own email server on the Freedom Box is fine
- especially if it's pretty transparent and 'just works' for them. But
the process of purchasing and associating a domain name with the box,
configuring the mail server to accept mail for the domain, configuring
MX records, etc, are all over the average users head.

When I was pursuing my project, my solution was to run an intermediate
domain service and then assign subdomains to each server sold. Then, all
the user would have to do is go into the interface and plug in their
subdomain and the service would just work. We'd (me, initially) would
handle everything on the backend domain side.

That, of course, would mean having an email address like
jdodson at jdodson.somedomain.net but it would streamline management a bit.

Obviously, this is not necessarily elegant or 'sexy'. How is the Freedom
Box going to handle this? I know the boxes can communicate with each
other directly but that won't do for network->freedom box email or for
freedom box->network mail.

Just wondering!

Anthony

-- 
Anthony Papillion
Advanced Data Concepts
Software Development and IT Services
Office: (918) 919-4624
Mobile: (918) 320-9968