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Re: "Thoughts on the draft spec"
There are some important things in this conversation. The first is whether it's intended that each user has their own server. If this is so, then that puts a high burden on people who are on ISPs where their IP Address may change, and it requires that you have a dedicated device in a fixed location on a fixed network. Not everybody has this, unless there's some way to put a misfin server on like your modem or something, because most people's computers nowadays are portable, and so they are never guaranteed to be on a fixed network (the devices connect to different networks as the person moves around the world).
So, having the option for multi-user servers is a really good thing, imho.
Next, having different mailboxes could be useful even for single individuals (send different types of mail to the different mailboxes of an individual, for example), and this could actually become a way of categorizing mail, which I find to be a really cool idea.
Now, the encryption thing is interesting. You need some way to get a key to encrypt your message with that public key, to send it to the person so that it can be decrypted by that person.
Getting the public key is easy - you ask the server for the public key. You encrypt the message, and you send it to that server. Then the receivers *client* on their own computer decrypts with the private key. This is practically how email worked in ZeroNet, lol, except ZeroNet was also decentralized by using a bittorent-like protocol. But this separates out email clients from email servers.
Now, I haven't read all about the protocol, so I don't know how attached email *clients*/readers are to the email servers, but there could be a client on one's own computer that has the private key, and the email server just has the public key that can be given to those who ask the server for it. This allows for a multi-user setup where there's a central email server and each person has a client that fetches the emails from that server. Yes, this is literally just a recreation of Pop3, lmao.
The other problem with encryption is how sending an email to multiple users works.
Sep 25 · 3 months ago
🦀 jeang3nie · Sep 25 at 14:22:
The spec doesn't go into how mail is stored and fetched, only the transmission. Servers and clients are pretty much free to invent.
If I eventually finish my implementation, the general idea is for a multi user system where the users all have shell accounts, as they would on a Pubnix. You log in and can view your mail with a simple pager or text editor. That provides a really sturdy fallback. On top of that, a webmail like system could eventually be built that serves your mailbox over Gemini using the same pubkey you use to send mail for access.
Thoughts on the draft spec — Misfin is a nice idea, but I'm worried that it doesn't make sense to replace email with something lacking end-to-end encryption. A server on a multi-user system gets the plaintext of messages to its users. It's fine if you run the server on your own home server, but I guess that wouldn't be the typical configuration. I wonder if it would be feasible to work in a PGP-like mechanism using the same client key as in the client certificate... Some other little thoughts...