Bitcoin Forum

Is there a way to have P2P e-mail?

Basically pay people in BTC to run servers on their computers holding encrypted e-mails with portals which allow people to connect to their e-mail.

The e-mail can include a one line ad on the bottom of the e-mail which advertisers pay BTC to have.

Thoughts?

I don't see how this is an improvement over simply using Freemail, or even something over i2p or Tor. ???

What exactly is it you are trying to accomplish with it? To make bitcoins selling email services to peers? Anonymous mail? Or what?

-MarkM-

Do you mean like a distributed webmail kind of thing? That would be interesting. Otherwise, everyone running their own mail server on their PC would be a nightmare. How do you contact a server that could be anywhere in the world, and possibly not be on all the time?

There have been proposals for functionality matching what you are looking for in a new namespace throughh the namecoin blockchain.  http://dot-bit.org/Messaging_System

http://www.epostmail.org/  there is this but I think its discontinued.

or *gasp* running your own mailserver.

Email is P2P. You can easily run your own SMTP server.

RetroShare (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retroshare) has also built-in mails and messaging. There's a thread somewhere with lots of "friends" to make. Folks run their nodes for free so far, without Bitcoin incentives. But maybe such a feat would boost the network significantly.

No one in that thread was reachable. They don't actually run retroshare at all, or if they do ever fire it up they presumably notice as I do that there is no one online to connect to thus they shut it down again as useless.

I even got a private message recently on these forums from someone claiming they will run it almost all the time, so I fired it up, saw that still there is no one to connect to, added them and waited and saw that they too were not online so unable to be connected to, and shut it down again.

I had 28 or more people from the thread PLUS another over 20 people I friended from being able to see the connections of the 28 in the thread, yet all of those second-step connections also were offline.

Meanwhile I have always found connections no problem when I fire up i2p or Tor or Freenet. So compared to any of those three I basically do not find retroshare worth bothering with. The whole point of a network is connections. Without connections there is no network.

Even if the person who resorted to PM to get me to add him or her does turn out to be online they next several times I fire up retroshare, that won't convince me to bother with it. When I see the majority of the people in the thread and/or the majority of the people I reached through them online every time I fire it up I might reconsider whether it is worthwhile.

-MarkM-

I am on RetroShare. I signed up. Added like 10 people that posted their GPG and then kept it online for a few hours. NOTHING. I can't join any forums, nothing.

Nice idea but it is not ready for prime time. What will be that KILLER APP?

Do you have i2p, Tor and/or Freenet running?

If not I suggest just run them 24/7 for now, the worry about whether there is any point at all in adding RetroShare to the mix later.

-MarkM-

I've got 2 people on RetroShare right now; I had up to 4 friends online at once.
I'm actually on there all the time. Drop me a PM with your (or anyone else if they want) key, and I'll add you. :)