Introduction

Emails are a basic part of our daily lives, but the underlying infrastructure is no longer fit for purpose in today’s privacy-centric landscape; as we move into the Web3 era, there is a massive opportunity to improve on the current status quo by building solutions and tools at the intersection of Web3 and email. If we look at it one way, cryptography popularized via Web3 can improve on traditional email practices around privacy, and on the other hand, the Web3 industry sorely needs a Web3 native communication system. I firmly believe EtherMail will become the communication platform of choice for Web3 users moving forward.

Email improved with Web3

Cryptocurrencies rely on cryptography, which antecedes even Bitcoin to encrypt data: public-private key encryption. This technology can also be used to encrypt emails while making communication more secure. Public-private key encryption has become increasingly popular with instant messaging platforms like WhatsApp and Signal. Besides, privacy-focused email clients like ProtonMail are strongly selling the service at a premium for end-to-end encrypted emails, though adoption levels remain relatively low. In the near future we may indeed see a much higher percentage of emails being sent privately using end-to-end encryption, thanks to Web3 making fashionable private key management.

For many users, migrating from familiar, easy to use tools such as Gmail or Apple mail to another technology solutions could be discerned as an unneeded administrative headache — even when the new technology is streets ahead of the legacy platforms. This is the lock-in result in action.

Curiously, with the rise of cryptocurrency, many more users are now close with encryption & cryptography, and have a broader valuing around the significance of privacy. There is now an ever growing subset of the inhabitant who have taken the leap to self-custody their digital assets. By doing so they are already fixing a private key that could also be used to encrypt / decrypt emails with peer-to-peer encryption. For that reason, the assumption of peer-to-peer email encryption will increase, with more users having secure self custody of a private key.

In the Web3 world, users are anonymous. Their address is public, and so are their digital asset holdings, but it is out of the question to know who they are and there is no easy way to make contact directly with them.

For long times this was not a problem, as there weren’t many use cases that could welfare from a communication system anyway. Since then, useful decentralized requests have gained commerciality; mostly in the financial sector and in the gaming/NFT sector, where communicating with users is of supreme importance. For instance, NFT investors may want to communicate straight and privately with a holder of an NFT they would like to obtain, without publicly bidding for it. Another example could be DeFi applications who may want to aware their users or inform them about governance conclusions, vulnerabilities, or share general updates.

The majority obvious challenge to put up a product like this is spam avoidance, given the addresses and therefore the emails are public. Naturally the content of the emails are not public, but it could make the lives of spiteful users easier by knowing who to target for phishing. EtherMail has already been structuring some very interesting spam prevention mechanisms, to be disclosed very soon.