Email is one of the primary communication mediums on the internet. It has become centralized and hosted by third parties. What efforts will Start9 play to decentralize email by making it easy to self-host?
You nailed it. Email is very difficult to do in a sovereign way, because it has been so thoroughly co-opted. In a near-term release of EmabssyOS, your Embassy and services running on it will be able to send emails. This is useful for notifications, invitations, and certain auth-related actions within services. It will not be, however, able to receive emails or serve as an alternative client to things like Gmail. Later, after we introduce clearnet (.com etc) support, it will be possible to run a full blown email server on your Embassy and connect to it from open source clients. However, to function well, it is still necessary to "play ball" with the various DNS and email verification standards, or else all your mail might get black holed. Ultimately, we think email is probably un-salvagable and needs to be replaced. This will take time, given how entrenched email is in our digital infrastructure and culture, especially in business.
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