There should be more effort on making home email servers easy to install and
use. A home email server would barely require any bandwidth or processing
power.
The same most people have home WiFi routers running 24/7, we should instead
have small, cheap and low-powered computers running GNU. Those kind of
computers should be capable of functioning as a WiFi router (and much
better!) and also have servers for email, web, XMPP, federated social
networking and anything you want to install.
We seem to have the hardware needed for this (single board computers), but
not the software. We need an OS that makes this issue to manage.
JadedCtrl:
> something that has to do with communicating with people (Like this forum,
IMing, webmail) is not you doing your computing on someone else's computer.
Webmail is not SaaSS.
An email service and instant messaging aren't a web forum. The point of a
forum is that your messages are made public one a specific website - you so
everyone can read your posts.
With email and IM your messages typically aren't for everyone read, they are
private. Also, you with email and IM you communicate with people who aren't
part of a specific site, so being dependent on someone (like Google) becomes
an issue.
quantumgravity:
> On the other hand, though i don't know much about the technical structure
of the internet, i believe your email has to pass a lot of servers anyway,
even if you send it with your own mail server.
> So it comes down to the question if you want to subdivide the process of
sending an email into smaller parts or just take it as one single process.
You can't have email contact to another person just with your own computer,
but you could do some parts of it.
That's not how it works. If you and I both have an email server, we can send
exchange messages without them passing through any other servers. Well, the
messages should still be encrypted between the servers, since all information
on the Internet goes through third parties such as ISP companies. That's why
we use TLS.
quantumgravity:
> I think it makes more sense to ask: Would i be able to avoid giving away
control over my data if i use a program on my own computer instead of using
this service?
> Because that's what it's all about, right? Control, and therefore freedom;
When it comes to email, the answer is no, both for webmail and mail server.
Can't agree with this conclusion. When people use their own email servers,
they gain privacy and independence from email server providers. Hence, they
gain control and freedom!
