Most people think of e-mail, when they see a user address. As we have user addresses for all of Chat, remoteStorage (soon), Social (not LDAP yet), and possibly other services in the future, it was proposed during the recent Summit that we should set up some kind of e-mail service.
The most simple version would be just a forwarding service, so that when someone sends e-mail to your Kosmos user address, it gets forwarded to the address stored in your LDAP/Accounts profile.
The more advanced version would be a full-on e-mail service. This could either be self-hosted by us, which currently no active contributor wants to be responsible for. Or we could partner with a decent service provider for that. For the latter case, the name Posteo was mentiioned.
Just stumbled upon https://mailbox.org and they look like they could make for a good partner, too. They have a long history and solid business, and they already allow anonymous account creation with bitcoin payments.
They’re located in Berlin, so one of us could go and talk to them in person perhaps.
would be super nice, as it looks like email addresses to users.
maybe somebody like hostsharing.net (which is a cooperative) might be interested. (they normally do hosting, but also offer email with the hosting)
Proton accepts Bitcoin payments and say they have “special pricing” for non-profit organizations, whatever that means. Found on Proton for Business plans and pricing | Proton (Bitcoin payments are mentioned in the FAQ at the bottom).
I have removed the “idea” tag from this thread, because… we have an email service now!
It’s already handling email for a handful of accounts, mostly the main Kosmos ones, which we were using Gandi mailboxes for, plus a couple of normal user accounts for more testing. It’s already possible to choose between local delivery and remote forwarding by just changing the maildrop attribute in LDAP.
There’s an open WIP PR for the server configs (with some things not pushed yet). However, the akkounts part for generating/updating email passwords and LDAP attributes is still missing.
If someone wants to test it with their own accounts already, please DM me here, and I can manually add the LDAP attributes for you.
would be super nice, as it looks like email addresses to users.