True P2P Email on Top of Yggdrasil Network

[hofrogs]

Be careful when installing Yggdrasil Network on your device - your device address will be available in a network/peer explorers and if your firewall is not configured to reject incoming connections from the yggdrasil ipv6 interface - your locally running services could get exposed.

[neilalexander]

Should be noted that this does not apply if you install Yggmail only without mainline Yggdrasil, as Yggmail embeds its own node and does not use TUN.

[preisschild]

this should be standard advise, always configure your host firewall correctly. Especially if you use something like ArchLinux where it doesn't come pre-configured

[velcrovan]

Systems can be so simple and elegant when you just assume no one will use them to send spam.

[jonathanstrange]

Spam can be filtered effectively client-side with a good spam filter. This has worked well for me for decades without the need for any server-side spam filtering.

[ddtaylor]

To be fair there have been multiple popular e-mail networks on Tor like SIGINT in the past and I never received spam there.

[idle_zealot]

Very cool. How does this deal with offline recipients? Do the messages just get dropped, or does Yggdrasil somehow store and deliver them?

[neilalexander]

I was surprised to see this on the HN homepage, I didn't create Tyr but I did create Yggmail (https://github.com/neilalexander/yggmail) which it is based on. There is no store-and-forward as such, the sending node will keep the message in its outbox and will keep retrying until the destination is online.

[evbogue]

back in the day a few of us used to run ssb (secure-scuttlebot) over yggdrasil (and cjdns before that) and that system would distribute the private messages to all of the peers within 3 hops. offline peers would just sync up when online and then decrypt the messages sent to them.

ssb's been broken for around five years, but now that it's working again it'd be fun try this experiment again.

2026 could be the year mesh networks finally take off!

[fattybob]

My first Linux install was Yggdrasil, just for that, this interests me…

[cbdevidal]

You’re OG. My first was some unknown distro that installed in DOS on my Win95 machine and dual booted that way. Totally confused me. Second was Red Hat 6.0 in 1999. That one, I was a little more successful with.

[eqvinox]

I kinda understand the point, but e-mail of all things… the one thing in the current tech stack that is in fact "P2P"… technically all you need is either a VPN that allows incoming connections to you on a fixed address on tcp/25, or a dyndns and any ISP with inbound tcp/25 open…

Also, E2E encryption >> "the network handles that".

[xeonmc]

    "Ok, we got an overlay network going. What protocol should we use for standard comms?"

Scenario 1:

    "Email?" "Email I guess." "Email."

Scenario 2:

    "IRC?" "Nah, XMPP." "Matrix!" 
    "Oh, we're suggesting chat protocols? Here's a #11th draft standard that ticks all the boxes for modern secure private chat."

[pshirshov]

Is my understanding correct that all involved parties must be online?

[jeroenhd]

The reference server is an Android app so yes, that is probably the point of the default design, but reading the README I believe you can also use a more traditional server-to-server setup:

    DeltaChat/ArcaneChat Integration
    
    DeltaChat and ArcaneChat are perfect companions for Tyr. These are messengers that use email protocols but provide modern chat interfaces. When you configure DeltaChat/ArcaneChat to use Tyr's local server:
    
        1. DeltaChat/ArcaneChat sends messages via SMTP to Tyr
        2. Tyr wraps them in Yggmail protocol and sends through Yggdrasil
        3. The recipient's Tyr receives the message via Yggdrasil
        4. Their DeltaChat/ArcaneChat fetches it via IMAP from their local Tyr
        5. All this happens peer-to-peer, with no central servers

If you run Tyr on a VPS/RPi/old smartphone, you can still exchange messages decentralised this way, as long as your server and the device/server you're communicating to are both online, and have DeltaChat/ArcaneChat fetch the messages later.

Such a setup could be useful if you find people around you using Tyr and you're losing messages because your phone kills the app, though a PoC like this probably won't have much of a network effect.

[lorenzo95]

If I were to run an yggmail server and configure delta-chat to talk to it, would I get a similar result?

[neilalexander]

Yes.

[kurokawad]

> Because the Internet was built around centralized infrastructure.

Yeah, well... No.

> We finally have this possibility to use true P2P email.

I mean, email is literally peer to peer.

> Your mail address is derived from your public key: <64-hex-characters>@yggmail

The email address is literally 64 hex characters? How am I supposed to use this on a daily basis?

I have serious doubts who are the target of this or what is the point of this to exist at all. It is literally worse than email.

[neilalexander]

> I have serious doubts who are the target of this or what is the point of this to exist at all. It is literally worse than email.

Yggmail is a fun proof-of-concept and that’s about it. It isn’t perfect, nor does it have to be.

“It’s email, but not as you know it.”