[p2p-research] P2P Email

[marc fawzi]

You're not exactly the average person. You're a researcher, speaker,
advocate, etc. I assume focused on p2p and social implications.

Therefore, there is no way to equate yourself to a soccer mom, an
accountant, or a tradesman. Those represent average people in the
context of technical aptitude/willingness to think, tinker and
experiment.

On Sat, May 9, 2009 at 7:41 AM, M. Fioretti <mfioretti at nexaima.net> wrote:
> I said I would not comment on Marc's alternative to email and I
> confirm it. It may very well be the best thing since slided bread for
> all I know, but it would need much more time than I could afford now
> to make an informed opinion.
>
> However, there are one or two things I feel I should make clear about
> the current system and the way I and others use it, just for the
> record.
>
> On Sat, May 09, 2009 06:39:12 AM -0700, marc fawzi wrote:
>
>> my experience with setting up my own SMTP/POP server on my own
>> machine involved configuring my router/NAT and firewall which is
>> beyond what the average person is willing to do.
>
> when I decided to go the opposite way of Gmail and similar, that is to
> take my online communication in my own hands and contribute to a more
> decentralized email infrastructure asap, I didn't stop for one second
> to check how difficult it would be to configure my router, NAT,
> firewall and so on, on my own home computer, for at least three
> reasons, in more or less increasing order of importance:
>
> 1) I was sure that if I could sort out something like SMTP and
>   POP/IMAP server configuration (which I eventually did) I could also
>   work out without problems that kind of stuff, at least in the case
>   of my own home configuration
>
> 2) laws and market conditions: today there is no guarantee, in mine
>   and many other countries, for people who want to run servers or
>   services of any kind directly from their own home. If you have a
>   private/residential contract for Internet access, the ISP can close
>   any port they want (and the most frequent case is just the outbound
>   email port) if they feel your usage is outside their "average Joe
>   at home" profile, and there is nothing in the contract that forbids
>   that. To have legally valid guarantees that this won't happen you
>   must subscribe much more expensive contracts.
>
> 3) reliability. Even if my ISP had come home to configure my router,
>   nat, firewall etc, gratis for me, I would have still gone for the
>   "virtual server in datacenter" solution, for all the reasons I've
>   already described.
>
> Marc's vision may turn up the perfect email replacement in the next
> decades, I have no idea.  I was just very puzzled to realize that he
> got the idea, or so it seems, from struggling about what was (and
> would still be, if I still needed a personal solution today) to me a
> non-existant issue, for all the reasons above.
>
>> So my argument with Marco was not to say that inter-mediation is
>> bad, but to say that the solution he uses can never be pervasive and
>> thus can never be "true p2p" ...
>
> does **everything** we need *have* to be "true p2p"? is it convenient?
> In a sense, this is the same issue discussed in case 2 of
> http://p2pfoundation.net/Thoughts_on_P2P_production_and_deployment_of_physical_objects
>
> and all this discussion was another example of confusion between
> Research and Development as explained in the same page (nobody's
> fault, of course). I developed a working solution with existing
> tools, while what Marc talks about is more in the research area.
>
> marco
> --
> Your own civil rights and the quality of your life heavily depend on how
> software is used *around* you:            http://digifreedom.net/node/84
>
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>



-- 

Marc Fawzi
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