The Future of Email Is Open

The speakers argue that email, roughly fifty years old, was built around a postal model where senders push a message out and lose control of it. They describe how copies pass through several intermediaries, how metadata stays visible even when content is encrypted, and how spam filtering depends on providers reading message contents. They also note that messaging across organizations remains clumsy compared with chat tools used inside a single company.

They then present OpenEmail, an open protocol they call mail over HTTPS, built on a pull model. A sender encrypts a message and uploads it to their own mail agent, then notifies the recipient. The recipient verifies the notice and fetches the content directly from the sender's agent, so it never passes through the recipient's own infrastructure. Contacts pair using hashed addresses so providers cannot see who is talking to whom. Public keys are found through profiles tied to email addresses, and the server side is meant to be small enough for a developer to write over a weekend. In the audience questions, the presenters explained that encrypted messages are kept for seven days so that multiple devices can sync, and discussed censorship resistance and whether large providers would adopt the design.

The talk ends as a call for early testers and feedback. The project is still in an early phase, with its code published openly, and the presenters want input before drafting anything formal. The practical takeaway is a set of design choices, such as pull delivery, self-authenticating senders, and client-side handling of edits, offered as a starting point for discussion.