[Freedombox-discuss] Email on FreedomBoxen?

[Samuel Rose]

On Mon, Jul 2, 2012 at 5:54 AM, Jonas Smedegaard <dr at jones.dk> wrote:
> As pointed out before, email is a can of worms easier avoided than
> handled properly.  Because "properly" means more than the classic
> "reliably" and "without too much spam": FreedomBox "properly" includes
> "free from maintenance" and "privacy-aware" and "low resource".
>
> How to limit spam on low-resource hardware without leaking privacy by
> use of external spam filters external smtp hosting?
>
> Only way I see is to limit smtp to trusted peers - which means not
> really standard internet email but custom FreedomBox-mail, as we need
> some custom mechanism to resolve who are friends _and_ tighten smtp
> setup to only communicate directly and securely with those friends.
>
>
>  - Jonas

Jonas, I concur with you here.

Has anyone among this group tried to experiment with running existing
email server/client software in a FreedomBox-to-FreedomBox network?
(assuming most would have to connect across commercial ISP lines). One
idea is that different configurations could be created that run
automated sending and receiving of email from a collection of freedom
boxes using existing software (such as Thunderbird for client, Postfix
and Courier for server, for instance).  People with FreedomBoxes could
volunteer to run these scripts/configurations in the background, and
data could be collected to see how well it actually holds up under
various conditions (a manager of scripts could be created that
randomly turns on and off participant box email servers).

In fact (and maybe this has been discussed previously) automated
testing could be a way to try and objectively evaluate many ideas,
especially seeing how the FreedomBox project seems to have at least a
criteria of:

(quoted from above):
> "reliably" and "without too much spam": FreedomBox "properly" includes
> "free from maintenance" and "privacy-aware" and "low resource".

One could automate on many of these factors: reliability,
vulnerability to spam attacks, privacy, and resource usage

Freedom from maint. seems like something that could be tackled once
the basics are solved, IMHO.