DMail Review - web3 email?
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.
DMail
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.
Summary
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
Dmail seems to me an interesting concept and am looking for alternatives to Gmail/GMX as these two are my go to email platforms.
It could be worth to check out and see how it progresses.
Yeah sure why not I will definitely be checking it out.
Very interesting, once it becomes a little more refined maybe we could all dump evil Gmail!
That would be great! 😅
More than a decade ago Goolag stole my username and simply took over my gmail account. I had a superlative name, and someone wanted it, so they just took it. Seeing how Goolag operated completely cured me of any interest in any of the products or services Alphabet, Inc. had on offer, and nothing I've seen since has changed my expectations in the slightest.
I am confident that Protonmail has at all times been a preferable option, and that if gmail users were informed of how their gmail was used by Goolag against them, gmail would collapse instantly.
I hope you give Protonmail a try without delay, and secure your user data from the most predatory company in the world today: Goolag.
I don't know well, but I've read from people in Silicon Valley who say Google has completely hijacked email. The protocol may be entirely open standards, but Google has managed to make it impossible for anyone to run their own independent email server. Again, I don't know the details of how, but I've read from enough people who have been running their own email servers for decades since the beginning of email who have had to sadly abandon them because Google has make running them impossible, so even though I don't completely understand the problem, I can believe it is one.
I still use gmail for my "common" email address, but I use protonmail for more personal and important email.
Anyway, Dmail sounds interesting. I'll go check it out!
I can certainly believe that and maybe the protocol is not as open as we believe it is. I think it is ripe for some web3 transformation or maybe email will become irrelevant at some stage, similar to SMS due to direct messaging.
Great share there Steve, and very interesting to see that work is being done to bring email to the blockchain, even if it's still early days, thanks a lot for sharing and stay awesome.
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Thanks Erik. It would be great to see something come in the web3 space.
Yes indeed.
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Well, this is a good thing if it accomplishes. I like the idea of not using these awful usernames and keys everywhere. If it happens this would be a best thing.
Thanks. Hopefully we will see some development in this area soon.
Yeah sure, we will see.
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Nowadays I very rarely use e-mail, but I prefer Gmail. I use the e-mail mostly to register on various websites. Very rarely to actually communicate with someone. For everyday communication I use mostly the Facebook Messenger.
I think Email could be becoming outdated and maybe only for some official communications.
That's cool
Gmail always require too much of our informations
This should be better
Thanks, I agree. Some competition would make things better.
Yay! 🤗
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Having a true web3 mail service will be really great as traditional email services like Google have invaded too much if our privacy. And the fact that Gmail has monopolize email is scary in a sense that they're sitting on a ton of personal data that could be used for unimaginable things.
Yeah, those are exactly my thoughts and it is time we took back our data.
I appreciate your emphasis on the true essence of web3: decentralization, censorship resistance, and user ownership. I'll be keeping an eye out for further developments with DMail based on your observations @mypathtofire
Thanks for checking it out. It is an interesting space.
It's exciting to know that mail is also coming in the realm of web3. If this will happen then it will be more easy and reliable for many of us.
I think it will be a big leap forward.
That's interesting to know.
Gmail demanding to know all our every step login can be unpleasant at times.
And we have nothing to gain from it.
Yes this is very true. They are holding a lot of personal data and who knows what they are using it for.
I hope it doesn't turn ugly one day.
Pretty cool. I was using one for a while called Proton Mail. I think it was decentralized, but maybe it was just encrypted. I ended up moving in a different direction, but it was interesting for the short time I used it.
Thanks. I've heard of Proton Mail but never tried it until now.
I agree with you on this, Steve. While the service does look interesting, it's not really at a place of actually being very useful. Also, given that it's not on the Hive Blockchain, my interest to explore it is not very great. Thanks much for your review! 😁 🙏 💚 ✨ 🤙
hehe very true!
I'd love to see a Hive-based email system! There's ListNerds, but that's not a usual mail service, so it doesn't really count. 😁 🙏 💚 ✨ 🤙
Yeah me too. I thought ListNerds was already dead though too.
ListNerds is not doing well. The site has been broken for several people (me included, I can't stake CTP) for quite a while now, and their programmer is MIA, so it's a bit rough at the moment. 😁 🙏 💚 ✨ 🤙
Can you withdraw your CTP ? Is it also stuck there?
I haven't tried to do that yet, but I've been thinking about, since the unstsked CTP that I have there is basically unused. I think I'll give it a try. 😁 🙏 💚 ✨ 🤙
Good luck!
Thank you! I was able to successfully send my liquid CTP from ListNerds to Hive Engine, so that's good! I haven't tried unstaking yet. 😁 🙏 💚 ✨ 🤙
That's a good sign!
Yes, I agree! I'll give it a little more time, then I'll unstake my tokens there and send them all to Hive Engine. 😁 🙏 💚 ✨🤙
Unstoppable Domains enables users to use their crypto domains and manage emails. They started off with web3 domains based on ETH addresses but in the meantime they might have added the email feature to domains that run on the Polygon and Zilliqa blockchain as well.
That would be pretty good if the domains were unstoppable. I didn't see that on Polygon yet.
Great work my friend @mypathtofire
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You're very welcome, Steve, absolutely! 😁 🙏 💚 ✨ 🤙
We have so many new things to learn each day
Yes, things are constantly changing.
It is very disappointing that Dmail hasn't met the very low bar of bettering the terrible services Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail - all sucking up every scrap of information that can be gleaned from our use of their products - provide. Protonmail remains the best such webmail service I have been able to find, other than invite only services not available to the general public.
Thanks!
Yes, I think the space is ripe for something totally new but DMail certainly isn't there yet. I didn't try Proton, but an escape from Google certainly would be good considering their data mining and we dont have control of our accounts.
Never heard about it before now, Interesting though, I will check it out. Thanks for sharing.
It's an interesting service and I am keen to see where it develops.
I am all for getting away from the bigwigs
Me too. Once you have your own keys, you want it in other aspects of your life too.
Brilliant job mate
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