It is so hard to get an email address without providing an email or SMS verification. Like 9/10 on the internet difficulty scale.
Any site that lets you receive email for example by generating a random inbox seems to be blocked by the more full-featured ones that let you send email. I’ve spent the last week trying to get an email address doing lots of searches and trying to signup for any email address at all without success.
This makes sense if you understand that bots cause problems universally but at the same time the personal information strategy isn’t working. Spammers have no problem getting email accounts and every other kind of account. It’s the honest person who won’t go to the dark side and pay for stolen accounts that is in the worst shape.
Maybe you want to setup your own mail server? Ther you need a domain name and registars want even more information. Many of them give you privacy on your domain records, but this is no defense from the surveillance state.
If as said in the sidebar mass surveillance is about mass control, and not justice, then email is an extremely important technology to start supporting for privacy and freedom.
Spam and abuse are problems to be sure but there must be other ways to solve them than by providing information that links back to the real world.
Now what can we do about it?
email is an extremely important technology to start supporting for privacy and freedom
No: email, even when encrypted, leaks plenty of metadata. From a privacy perspective it has been a lost cause for decades. We need new protocols.
Are there even any candidates at the moment? What would a next gen email look like, one that didn’t leak metadata?
Briar is a good example.
Matrix is the successor to email. Open spec, encryption-first design, federated, much easier to self host and possibly p2p in the future.
It leaks plenty of metadata. Also it’s hardly easy to self-host.
How do you avoid leaking metadata to your server in a federated system?
By using onion routing to connect to it, as Briar does. Also by not having a server at all, again as Briar does.
Briar’s server is the app itself, all federation metadata concerns also apply to p2p federation. Your briar app leaks metadata to every other device it talks with.
No. Data sent between nodes e.g. messages, images and status is not a leak. It is what the applications are supposed to handle. Third parties do not receive data or metadata.
If you have any reliable source to back your claims please share it.
Does the matrix protocol even enable an inbox-message-delivery type of communication similar to email, or is it all about room synchronisation?
At least with the current clients even a 1to1 chat is a room state synchronised across the involved servers, and doesn’t lend itself to managing messages in an inbox very well.
Its even better than email in that regard, you have to accept a message request before they can spam you. And it looks really no different from email, with a list of conversations being equivalent to your inbox.
Link please, most of the search results for that don’t seem to be what you’re referring to.
And isn’t there a way to sign into things with Matrix? Like OAuth? I thought I heard of that somewhere.
No matrix has its own auth system for signing into it. But more importantly they have bridges that can connect matrix rooms to other services, like IRC, xmpp, etc.
Protonmail doesn’t require an email or phone number. It just requiers your IP address for sign up
I know this isn’t super helpful in answering your question, but it would be nice if we didn’t need to rely on technology like email for account creation at all. The domain name provider njalla allows for account creation using an XMPP address, and the VPN provider mullvad generates a random string of numbers as your username. If only the rest of the web followed suit.
danwin1210.de has been my go-to Email for years.
Hosting email is hard so big props to whomever’s running that. Will try it thanks.
See table “Email Hosting market share table” https://www.datanyze.com/market-share/email-hosting--23
Google, Microsoft, and Godaddy collectively control 79% of the email market. You effectively can’t deliver email if they – the first two in particular – say you can’t. So every other provider has to dance to their tune. This is, at this point, an economic problem.
If you want to re-decentralize email, and the web overall, you have to figure out what to do about the increasing concentration of Internet infra into an ever-smaller number of hands. I’m guessing there is not a technical solution to this.
I’m guessing there is not a technical solution to this
We need dead simple turn key solutions for self hosted services. Simple as setting up a wifi router or some other consumer focused device.
Users get to use networks on terms dictated by their ISP’s. My ISP blocks self-hosted email. They did so because it was not in their interest – spammers were using the functionality to run spam ops. They still allow for self-hosting, but as self-hosting becomes more popular, ISPs’ residential networks are going to become a security minefield and an increasing liability. They will tighten the screws on what people are allowed to self-host and how, or they’ll just make it painful to impossible.
You make very valid points. What do you think is a scalable, decentralized solution to this problem? What if we decentralized ISPs themselves with mesh networks like Althea?
Decentralizing network ownership is the best way to go imho. Start building locally-owned and controlled networks! Then start building connections between them!
Hosting your own receive only email is not so difficult, so you can use that for signing up on all sorts of services and forward messages to a XMPP address that looks the same.
When people complain that you never reply, just tell them to contact you through xmpp ;)
Any guides you know of?
Does this not require a domain name?
.ml is a fee domain name and plus, domains are only around 5-10$.
It is not an issue of cost, but of the email address catch22. A new identity has no email and doesn’t .ml require that for registration?
