Serverless Electronic Mail

TL;DR

This paper presents a peer-to-peer email system that uses SMTP and Tor, enabling users to communicate securely without third-party servers, supporting multiple identities, trust bootstrapping, and integration with existing email infrastructure.

Contribution

It introduces a novel peer-to-peer email architecture leveraging Tor and self-certifying names, allowing decentralized trust, multiple identities, and interoperability with current email systems.

Findings

Supports unlinked identities for privacy.

Uses Tor onion services for trust and encryption.

Interoperates with existing email protocols.

Abstract

We describe a simple approach to peer-to-peer electronic mail that would allow users of ordinary workstations and mobile devices to exchange messages without relying upon third-party mail server operators. Crucially, the system allows participants to establish and use multiple unlinked identities for communication with each other. The architecture leverages ordinary SMTP for message delivery and Tor for peer-to-peer communication. The design offers a robust, unintrusive method to use self-certifying Tor onion service names to bootstrap a web of trust based on public keys for end-to-end authentication and encryption, which in turn can be used to facilitate message delivery when the sender and recipient are not online simultaneously. We show how the system can interoperate with existing email systems and paradigms, allowing users to hold messages that others can retrieve via IMAP or to operate as a relay between system participants and external email users. Finally, we show how it is possible to use a broadcast protocol to implement mailing lists and how distributed ledger technology might be used to bootstrap consensus about shared knowledge among list members.