[Freedombox-discuss] Email backchannel via onion routing?

[Petter Reinholdtsen]

Regarding the missing email server feature in FreedomBox, I would love
to see a working onion routed email server in FreedomBox.  The goal of
this feature is not to replace gmail.com or any other publicly available
mail server, nor to be able to send emails to these servers, but to be
able to send to other users of FreedomBox, and any others using "onion"
email servers.

If my Freedombox was set up to accept emails for me on a port available
on an onion address, and hand out these emails to me using IMAP, as well
as accept emails sent by me to be routed via Tor to other onion
addresses, I would be able to send emails to my friends and family with
their own FreedomBox.  Their email clients could be set up to fetch
emails using IMAP both from their normal account and their FreedomBox,
and send all @*.onion emails through their FreedomBox.

As it is hard to get Google, Microsoft and others to accept emails from
new and unknown mail servers, due to their well developed spam detection
system, it will be hard to get a FreedomBox to send emails to email
users on these systems.  But it would be a lot easier to get
FreedomBox-es to accept emails for each other.

Worth a try?

A proof of concept setup for this is described in
<URL: http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Debian_package_for_SMTP_via_Tor__aka_SMTorP__using_exim4.html >.

-- 
Happy hacking
Petter Reinholdtsen