[Freedombox-discuss] Independent email services

[Marc Manthey]

Am 26.02.2011 um 23:00 schrieb Matthias-Christian Ott:

> On Sat, Feb 26, 2011 at 03:04:40PM -0600, Anthony Papillion wrote:
>> 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.
>
> Whereby you would create a single point of failure and essentially  
> don't
> achieve your goal of decentralisation.
>
>> 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.
>
> There is no way around setting the MX record.
>
> Another solution would be to create an overlay network and address
> hosts by their public key fingerprint which I doubt will be easier for
> the user.
>
> Addressing seems to be an unsolved problem for average people anyhow.
> Not everyone will have their own domain or subdomain. And even if they
> do, it requires manual configuration regardless how good the user
> interface is.
>
> Another aspect is the centralised nature of the DNS. Though there
> have been some ideas , I'm not aware of a working solution
> and I doubt that there can be a global, consistent, self-organising
> and anonymous DNS.


I am very enthusiastic from  the idea of  "zeroconf "(http://zeroconf.org 
  )  and  "wide area bonjour" ( http://dns-sd.org/ )

and this projects takes the best pieces of everything to build a  
distributed name system.

--------

UIA is a distributed name system and ad-hoc routing infrastructure  
which provides zero-configuration connectivity among users' mobile  
devices without the use of centralized servers. Each user has a local  
namespace which is shared among all her devices and is always  
available on every device. Users can assign personal names to each of  
their devices, and can also name other users and access their friends'  
namespaces. UIA devices automatically maintain connectivity with other  
named devices, both in ad-hoc networks and in the global Internet when  
available.


http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/uia/


------------

comments welcome


greetings

Marc


--  
Les enfants teribbles - research / deployment
Marc Manthey- Vogelsangerstrasse 97
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Opinions expressed may not even be mine by the time you read them, and  
certainly don't reflect those of any other entity (legal or otherwise).