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These days, email is an essential piece of personal and professional communication. For everyday life, emails are an effective means of conducting business transactions, conducting casual conversations, etc. Yet, while this is the case, the current email infrastructure is simply centralised and gives way to the same privacy, security, and control risks.
For years, these centralised services have made up a large portion of the market: Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, etc., offering convenience in an array of ways but also allowing a whole lot of easier attack points for hackers, advertisers, and even governments.
In response to challenges, centralised email services have evolved into a decentralised concept. In fact, at the heart of this new wave of innovation is blockchain technology. With its ubiquitous, decentralised, transparent, and secure nature, blockchain is poised to transcend email services and deliver privacy, autonomy, and control for users.
In this article post, we explore the use of blockchain in decentralized email services, in which we explain what this technology is, how it works, what its benefits are, and what we believe to be its transformative powers for email.
Traditional Email Infrastructure: Centralised Control
In this article, it’s necessary to disclose how exactly blockchain is changing our email, but to do it, we need to define what paradigm we are departing from, meaning the current centralised model of email services.
Web-based systems such as Gmail, Yahoo, or Outlook mail are centralised mail systems since they use central servers and service providers to store users’ mail data. These providers control both the delivery and storage of your emails, creating several issues:
Privacy Concerns
Outsourced email service providers can or likely possess the content of emails, attachments, as well as other users’ data and personal information.
This information can be utilised by corporations for particular selling of their products or even used in selling to other marketers. Nevertheless, it has been seen on many occasions that specific email service providers have been involved in the violation of user privacy.
Security Risks
Most centralised email systems are at risk of being hacked. Those hackers who can sabotage the central servers can access massive data that may be confidential. In the past, we have seen large numbers of hacker attacks on such services as Yahoo and Gmail, where many millions of users’ accounts were invaded.
Censorship and Control
Another disadvantage of centralised email systems is that proponents can also easily censor the mail. Governments or service providers can selectively reject and filter mail and, at worst, depress the accounts themselves.
This harms the sharing of information and can even stifle free speech, especially among people living in countries with unfree governments.
Blockchain: A Decentralised Solution
Blockchain can be defined as an innovative system that facilitates the creation of decentralised distributed ledgers and is famous for being the underlying technology of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Different from many traditional systems in which there is usually a main authority or server, users in blockchain networks are organised as nodes, and every node contains a full copy of the ledger, making it difficult to tamper with or censor this blockchain.
Blockchain Key Characteristics
1. Decentralisation: It isn’t just a single point of control or failure. The blockchain is accessible to every participant in the network, and every participant is given an equal say in the decision-making.
2. Transparency: The blockchain ensures the accountability of all transactions on it and lessens the possibility of fraud.
3. Security: The data is secured using cryptographic techniques through blockchain, and it’s almost impossible to change transaction records without those being noticed.
4. Immutability: As soon as data is recorded on the blockchain, it cannot be changed, and information is always as it should be.
Considering these traits, blockchain would be able to overcome most of the problems of the centralised email system. In this post, I want to show how blockchain technology could improve email services, and we’ll explore how in various ways.
The Way Blockchain Can Change Email Services
1. Enhanced Privacy and Security
Enhancing your privacy and security is one of the key benefits of decentralised email operated on blockchain. Using blockchain-based email services, the users own their data and can rest assured that no entity, except the user, would have access to the content of the user’s emails. Here’s how this works:
• End-to-End Encryption: Blockchain email systems encrypt email using very strong cryptographic encryption, allowing only the sender and the recipient to read the email contents.
What it means is that even if a hacker succeeds at getting into the blockchain network, he or she won’t be able to break open the emails, making it much more secure than any traditional system of emails.
• Decentralised Storage: Instead of depending on centralised data centres, it uses blockchain email systems that distribute data email across various nodes on the network. It’s much harder for hackers to breach the whole network because they don’t have a single point of failure.
• No Central Authority: In the blockchain, however, there’s no control over the email system from a central authority. That means governments, corporations, or other third-party organisations cannot easily track or censor users’ emails.
2. Freedom from Censorship
Most email providers are hosted on centralised servers, which can censor or block any emails that you send at any point. However that may be, systems maintained by government or corporations can limit user communication, whether by government orders or corporate policy.
Preventing this is one way blockchain-based email can work—by ensuring that there is no single entity controlling the platform. Since the network is decentralised, no one can block the intercommunication between delivery and reception of messages.
3. Data Ownership and Control
Because of traditional email systems, users don’t own their data. Typically, the data belongs to the email provider, who owns and stores it for targeted advertising or to be given to third parties.
Unlike blockchain, users with Filecoin retain complete ownership of their data. Blockchain-powered email service enables users to determine who can start reading their emails for a certain period.
Furthermore, blockchain enables users to completely pull themselves off the network. Blockchain gives the power to the user, who owns their data and can control when it is to be removed, while centralised systems maintain their data indefinitely (even after it is deleted).
4. Reduced Spam and Fraud
Phishing and spam attacks are perennial problems when it comes to traditional email systems. However, blockchain technology, using a decentralised authentication system, can minimise the risk of these problems arising. Here’s how:
Verified Senders: Using blockchain means that such senders can be checked by cryptographic signatures for the authenticity of users, making sure that emails come from sources you can trust and not from malicious actors. Preventing phishing attacks and fraud.
Transparent Transaction Records: A traceable record of every email sent through the blockchain would be left proving its origin. It discourages spammers and fraudsters from abusing the email system for bad reasons.
5. Decentralised Identity Management
Integration of decentralised identity (DID) management is one of the more advanced features of blockchain email systems. In traditional email systems, people rely on centralised identities under the control of Google or Microsoft. What that also means is that if these services are breached, your identity or your account could be at risk.
However, blockchain can solve this problem by giving users a decentralised and cryptographically secure identity that they control.
This identity can be used to verify email addresses, preventing the user from receiving email from non-human origin, for example, from a bot that has sent emails without presenting their identity. Thus, decentralised email platforms become a safer and more private personal and professional communication.
6. Improved Email Authentication
Also, email authentication can be improved by the inherent security features of a blockchain. Public and private keys allow email senders and receivers to authenticate their identities without resorting to other (human) measures.
With blockchain, an email can be made sure to have not been tampered with in the process of travelling to its intended address and that the delivered content is authenticated.
7. Cost Reduction
The cost of infrastructure, security, and customer support is high with traditional email, so systems are forced to fight just to survive. Some blockchain email services eliminate all these costs by using a decentralised network and removing most need for central servers and overall overhead costs.
If blockchain technology develops, we will see the creation of email services powered by blockchain that are cheap for users and also feature expanded privacy and security.
Challenges and Limitations
While blockchain-powered email services hold significant promise, there are challenges to overcome:
1. Adoption and Integration: It will take time until the blockchain technology is adopted by the email systems on a widespread basis. Blockchain is unfamiliar to many users, and using decentralised services requires a learning curve.
2. Scalability: Usually, blockchain networks that are using a proof-of-work struggle with scalability. In an email service, you need a lot of throughput, and the main challenge with blockchain email is making sure that it can handle millions or even billions of emails under delay.
3. User Experience: Today’s email systems are advanced user experience machines, as the interfaces are intuitive and the operations seamless. To allow for the adoption of blockchain-based systems, the level of convenience must be this high and also secure and private.
4. Regulatory Concerns: The wild nature of blockchain-based communication can concern governments and regulatory bodies who do not consider it to be ‘legit,’ especially if it is being used for illegal activities. This may prove to be resistance to the blockchain email services adoption.
Conclusion
Until now, as with many things, the integration of the blockchain in decentralised email services is a major step forward in the evolution of email communication.
Blockchain can address key problems such as privacy, security, censorship, data control, etc., and enable users to be less dependent on their email accounts by reasserting their autonomy. Intact transparency, immutability, and decentralisation inherent to blockchain technology are the perfect bases for a more secure, user-centric email system.
Challenges gladly remain, but the potential immensity of blockchain email communication is huge. Since technology will become more mature and blockchain will mature as well, email will most probably become a part of our future and offer more choice, control, privacy, and security to users in digital communication.
We may end up with a future of decentralized email, and blockchain is where that future could be unlocked.