Chatmail makes e-mail fun, secure and instant
The Chatmail project develops and releases FOSS infrastructure templates and libraries for interopable and secure instant e-mail messaging, enforcing automatic end-to-end encryption and metadata minimization, with optional ephemeral Peer-to-Peer messaging to top it off. The future is now: Chatmail makes e-mail fun, secure and instant.
Chatmail is a community-driven project that is raising the floor for interoperable FOSS alternatives to centralized proprietary instant messaging services. Chatmail transport operators, as well as app and bot developers, and all of their users, benefit from our efforts. We are also contributing to raising and fixing the floor for billions of users who unknowingly depend on the integrity, resilience, security and reliability of the e-mail system.
Chatmail relays: interoperable, secure and cheap to run
chatmail/relay helps to automatically deploy a minimal Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) that only transmits end-to-end encrypted and metadata-minimized Internet Messages. Chatmail relays provide ephemeral transport only, not long-term storage, and rely on cryptographic interoperability standards to interact with other MTAs, entirely cutting out the need for IP reputation and spam-checking machinery.
Chatmail relays are therefore cheap to run and use:
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Hosting costs for 100K relay users are around half a Cent per user and year.
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System administration costs are near-zero after setup.
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Apps and bots can freely use instant chatmail addresses, avoiding classic e-mail server rate limits.
Chatmail core: reliable Rust library for chat apps and bots
chatmail/core is a cross-platform infrastructure Rust library integrated by many chat bots and higher level applications, allowing secure participation in the globally scaled e-mail relay network. Chatmail core offers a high level JSON-RPC API for managing contacts and chats, and for sending and receiving instant messages via e-mail and P2P realtime messages, while quietly taking care of many low-level details:
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secure TLS setup with DNS caching and other resiliency features
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robust SMTP and IMAP connection handling
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safe MIME and OpenPGP parsing and e-mail building
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reliable Peer-to-Peer Iroh networking
We are helping to maintain some of the involved 600 Rust dependencies and regularly provide upstream bug reports and fixes.