Comment by baron3dl
16 hours ago
You can do this right now, and you don't even need to fork anything. E-mail is an internet scale protocol that's not owned or ownable, except by convention. Since you specifically want to cut out Google, and their attempts to capture E-mail are what makes rolling your own E-mail hard anyway, just go for it.
Depending on how hard you want to make it, you can slap all the parts together yourself or use something like Zimbra, Mailcow, iRedMail, mail-in-a-box.
The advantage over a fork, whatever specifically that means, is any service that needs E-mail as an identity verification, still works.
What I am proposing is that community email servers can talk to each other. I have email servers setup - all the hoops - for my community. I want others to set up community servers and be able to interoperate. My server can send and receive from other communities. No corporations, no tracking. If your sever spams it gets dropped from the federation. Yes it is more complex, and there will be problems and issues. But hey, if we can have crypto currency why can't we get emails?
let's say this federation has three communities, a, b, and c. you run a, I run b, and my spammy friend runs c. C is my friend, and I'm going to keep allowing him to send me email, but you drop him, because he spammed you.
that's literally how email works today, unless the federation can supersede my authority as an operator to choose who may send/receive with me, at which point it'd stop being a federation anyway.