[HN Gopher] True P2P Email on Top of Yggdrasil Network
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True P2P Email on Top of Yggdrasil Network
Author : basemi
Score : 86 points
Date : 2025-11-28 16:35 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| fattybob wrote:
| My first Linux install was Yggdrasil, just for that, this
| interests me...
| cbdevidal wrote:
| 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.
| idle_zealot wrote:
| Very cool. How does this deal with offline recipients? Do the
| messages just get dropped, or does Yggdrasil somehow store and
| deliver them?
| neilalexander wrote:
| 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.
| Barbing wrote:
| Neat
|
| "End-to-end encrypted email for the mesh networking age"
|
| Perhaps wish we weren't headed for such an age but glad
| Yggmail is here for it!
| throawayonthe wrote:
| interesting, i kinda wish we _were_ headed for such an age
| but i doubt we are
| sunshine-o wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Yes I might be wrong but my understanding is there is no
| point in creating another system where messages hop from one
| peer to the other like Meshtastic or Reticulum (what make
| sense for their use case).
|
| Let's say users have their "email server" running on both on
| there mobile phone and a home server and in sync. We can
| expect 2 of the 4 servers will be online at the same time to
| send the message. I personally like those odds, Internet is
| pretty reliable in our days.
|
| I believe we have spent too long trying to solve very hard
| trilema in messaging, trying to have it all: confidentiality,
| anonymity and uncensorability ... and reliability ... and
| ease of use. The result is in practice most people use GMail,
| Outlook and Whatsapp.
|
| Yggdrasil is fantastic, it goes back some original ideas of
| the Internet we have almost forgotten, and in practice solves
| a lot of problem we have been dealing with for too long.
| evbogue wrote:
| Tyr is probably overkill with Deltachat on top of yggdrasil.
| The network already is encrypted so it's fine to send
| plaintext emails as long as there's no 3rd party email hubs.
| evbogue wrote:
| 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!
| nanomonkey wrote:
| Curious why you believe it was broken, and is now fixed. What
| new development are you referring to? I agree that Patchwork
| kinda took a dive, and functionality started to bitrot with
| each new maintainer...but it still replicates feeds.
| evbogue wrote:
| I couldn't get any of their latest versions working. The
| ssb-server was still functioning, but had no working client
| that I could find. https://github.com/evbogue/ssbc is a
| working fork with a patchbay lite client from circa 2015/16
| live at https://ssb.evbogue.com/ (with git-ssb!). I'm also
| recreating pfrazee's original Phoenix client from scratch.
|
| Let's talk more on a more appropriate channel. Are you on
| bsky? we're having a small discussion there about "bringing
| open source projects back from the dead with AI" right now.
| pshirshov wrote:
| Is my understanding correct that all involved parties must be
| online?
| jeroenhd wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| If I were to run an yggmail server and configure delta-chat to
| talk to it, would I get a similar result?
| velcrovan wrote:
| Systems can be so simple and elegant when you just assume no one
| will use them to send spam.
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