[Freedombox-discuss] Independent email services

[Matthias-Christian Ott]

On Sat, Feb 26, 2011 at 03:04:40PM -0600, Anthony Papillion wrote:
> Asking everyone to run their own email server on the Freedom Box is fine
> - especially if it's pretty transparent and 'just works' for them. But
> the process of purchasing and associating a domain name with the box,
> configuring the mail server to accept mail for the domain, configuring
> MX records, etc, are all over the average users head.
> 
> When I was pursuing my project, my solution was to run an intermediate
> domain service and then assign subdomains to each server sold. Then, all
> the user would have to do is go into the interface and plug in their
> subdomain and the service would just work. We'd (me, initially) would
> handle everything on the backend domain side.

Whereby you would create a single point of failure and essentially don't
achieve your goal of decentralisation.

> That, of course, would mean having an email address like
> jdodson at jdodson.somedomain.net but it would streamline management a bit.
> 
> Obviously, this is not necessarily elegant or 'sexy'. How is the Freedom
> Box going to handle this? I know the boxes can communicate with each
> other directly but that won't do for network->freedom box email or for
> freedom box->network mail.

There is no way around setting the MX record.

Another solution would be to create an overlay network and address
hosts by their public key fingerprint which I doubt will be easier for
the user.

Addressing seems to be an unsolved problem for average people anyhow.
Not everyone will have their own domain or subdomain. And even if they
do, it requires manual configuration regardless how good the user
interface is.

Another aspect is the centralised nature of the DNS. Though there
have been some ideas (e.g. [1]), I'm not aware of a working solution
and I doubt that there can be a global, consistent, self-organising
and anonymous DNS.

Regards,
Matthias-Christian

[1] http://idons.askemos.org/