MyMail Launches Testnet for Decentralized Self-Sovereign Email
MyMail’s founder, DMac, is a philosopher of self-sovereign email. Since the previous Open Web Foundry, where he pitched his vision of an uncensorable, trustless communication protocol, the MyMail Protocol Twitter account has been slowly dripping out teasers that hint at Arweave’s role in the future of email.
Put another way, there hasn’t been a shift in the dominant computing platform of the day that hasn’t included email. By extending email to Web3 we can accelerate the worlds transition to decentralized messaging. https://t.co/iJozurhtDr
— MyMailProtocol 🐘 (@MyMailProtocol) November 10, 2021
MyMail’s pitch at Open Web Foundry 4 showed the app was able to send mail to a Gmail account, proving it was able to overcome the tricky task of convincing Google and other webmail services that it was a trusted source, despite being a totally new type of node.
Since then, MyMail has been heads down in development mode to bring the first stage of MyMail to life: an implementation of weavemail, which will soon bridge in SMTP email, and release the code that makes it possible for anyone to run a node.
Unlike Gmail, which takes control over a user’s DNS, inbox, identity and storage, MyMail puts the user in control of these components and uses Arweave for permanent storage.
What if Email was something you bought from a protocol that had no interest in your personal information?
— MyMailProtocol 🐘 (@MyMailProtocol) September 23, 2021
Late last week, DMac started the MyMail Discord server and shared the link to try the app alongside an 8-step roadmap. Now the app is launched, the next two major milestones are to deploy more MyMail nodes and get the community involved with staking and slashing. This will decentralize the MyMail network and incentivize community members to run part of the infrastructure.
Later down the line, MyMail will add email addresses as NFTs and a web2-to-web3 bridge to support email (as well as the current weavemail). The final goals for MyMail’s foreseeable future lead to a token launch and support for users to pay in tokens other than AR, e.g. SOL and ETH.
To escape the control exerted by Gmail, Hotmail, or even a higher quality paid email service, the only real option before MyMail was to run it yourself. You could either run it from a home server or a VPS – both centralized and unreliable, even if one offers marginally more control than the other. MyMail is setting up a network of staked nodes that users can either host themselves or choose to trust, knowing they will be protected by the slashing mechanism.
The weavemail alpha app is just the start – as DMac said in the inaugural MyMail announcement, “welcome to the first node”.
Try the alpha at permamail.app, and join the Discord here.
