One of the areas that I am most excited about in the web3 space is the development of a decentralised email service that will free us from the do no evil Google. Email has pretty much remained the same since the first Outlook and Hotmail addresses many decades ago. Only some development has been made by Gmail to enhance it slightly, but mostly so they can spy and monetise us as much as possible.
My thoughts are that we could first get rid of these awful username and password requirements everywhere and use some cryptographic logon as the first step and then maybe towards a full decentralised email service in the second step.
Current email services use something called TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) and you may be familiar with the protocols SMTP, POP and IMAP. So any email service would also need to be able to communicate with this legacy service initially as well as whatever the new web3 service could look like.
I stumbled across DMail that claims to be a web3 email service and thought it would be a great chance to check out their service and see how far we are to a true web3 email service.
On the front page of DMail it claims to own your first web3.0 mailbox so I was very intrigued and launched DMail.
Connections with DMail
Although DMail has its own Inbox, you can see it can seemlessly connect with many chains and also to legacy web2 services like Gmail by forwarding on any messages received. Therefore, it is not a replacement for Google just yet.
The DMail Inbox
In the inbox it looks all quite neat and tidy as I don't have a mass of mails stored there yet. There are many ways to create a mailbox from many of the signing devices and your email address is made up then of your public key @dmail.ai. Probably not an email address you are going to remember very easily, but then you may just forward them from web3 to web2 at the moment by the looks of things.
Choosing your signing device
Options to create your new web3 inbox are using web2 Google through to some web3 options such as Metamask. If I was thinking to use a signing device for my email, Metamask would probably be at the bottom of the list. It is no Hive Keychain or Alby. To create the actual mail address I signed in using Metamask and my inbox appeared.
To send a mail, you can send to others using traditional web2 email addresses or the web3 options by DMail which seems to have aims to be like an oracle allowing you to send mail to others, no matter what chain/signing device they have used as each are assigned a DMail ID.
Other benefits proclaimed by DMail are to give you notifications of anything onchain that you want monitored and that can be forwarded to your email address. What exactly and how that might be done is too early as there didn't seem any options yet.
There was also pretty much no documentation when looking through their help info, despite claims of millions of registered users. When browsing their latest news on Medium, it also didn't seem to have very much to read or say about the program.
Overall, I think the idea seems quite interesting, but the usecase of this service so far doesn't seem to be there. DMail seems like linking the web2 email protocol via email forwarding to some sort of web3 blockchain alert system that is not really seeming so useful and solving any of the issues with web2 email decentralisation and content ownership.
Web3 for me is about decentralisation, censorship resistance and in regards to email, giving you back ownership of your emails and providing some privacy. DMail seems to look to make money selling DMail domains and possibly some NFTs which is straying from providing a next generation email service.
I will keep monitoring the service and see if there are any further improvements to come.
Thanks for reading.
Credits:
Title image created with image from source
Screenshots taken from DMail website for review purposes.
Let's connect : mypathtofire
