Hi all, I was thinking earlier about all the services that I’d like to see built on blockstack and of all the ones I thought of, the one that interested me most was email. More specifically email that’s compatible with current email protocols (IMAP, SMTP, POP3). I’m not sure if it would be possible because there’d have to be a centralized server somewhere acting as an intermediary to handle requests for the incoming protocol and then put them on gaia somewhere (right?). Having said that, I think that having the compatibility with current protocols would be about the only way for it to get any serious adoption. Is there any way that you could pull something like this off?
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Email is already the most decentralized service we are using online, IMHO.
Using your blockstack id for accessing your email services would be great. I think it should not be very difficult to take something like Isotope Mail and add Blockstack authentication to it.
Do you think that choosing your email service provider (that stores your messages) is not enough? What are you missing?
Maybe you could host your email server on your device and let it sync with your storage provider but most ISP don’t let you do that.
I guess I hadn’t really thought of it that way, although I don’t know that I would consider being able to choose your own email provider an example of decentralization (possibly because I’m either misinformed or just don’t understand the ideas behind decentralization well enough). The reasoning behind my thinking is that while choosing your email provider does give you some control over where your data goes, ultimately you’re still giving control to your provider. I was mostly thinking about data ownership when I made this post but since there are providers who offer encrypted storage (ProtonMail) maybe that means just being able to choose your own provider is enough, you just have to be smart about who you choose as your provider. I guess this goes back to the model that Gaia is built on though where you either host a hub yourself or trust a server hosted by someone else.