Way back in 2001, Amit Asaravala observed: “Who hasn’t been frustrated when a mail server delays important messages for hours, or when the server goes down all together? There is great potential here to bypass the corporate Exchange or Notes server.”

That’s the core of p2p fans’ gripes about Old School SMTP-style email:

  1. Server-centric dependency lacks resilience.
  2. When the email server is down you can’t get mail.
  3. Excessive traffic creates bottlenecks.

Base your email transport on something like gnutella, they say, and you’ll diffuse message delivery across a sea of nodes. Blow up a node, and its peers will still see that the message reaches its target. The dream even made it onto Wired’s 101 Ways To Save The Internet.

Early efforts, like the JXTA p2p-email project, have languished. More recently, BBC News gushed over jeftel, which apparently morphed into amteus, then dropped to radio silence after some gumshoe work by Tech Dirt and Friends. One of the few business-critical efforts still standing is ePOST, by the FreePastry group at Rice University.

The jeftel/amteus project promised a serverless environment. But both sender and receiver must maintain accounts at jeftel, so jeftel’s directory (don’t-call-it-server) can match them up and jeftel’s certificate (don’t-call-it-server) can provide authentication. The World (don’t-call-them-geeks) received the concept… cooly.

[A p2p email scheme that requires a lot of (don't-call-them-servers)]

ePOST takes another route, meshing Old School email systems with p2p:

ePOST works by joining a peer-to-peer network running a personal IMAP and SMTP server on your desktop, which is only for your email. ePOST is backward compatible with existing email systems, and your ePOST email address works just like a normal email address - you can send and receive messages from non-ePOST users. Additionally, you can use your existing email clients with ePOST, since ePOST provides standard IMAP and POP3 servers.

Sadly, if you’re an email administrator, you cannot read this sentence, as your heart just stopped. For the non-managerial audience, suffice it to say that an army of SMTP servers generating email for unknown senders behind the Corporate Firewall is simply not in the cards.

Meanwhile, Old School Email waddles on, using ancient techniques like geographically dispersing secondary servers and new-fangled tricks like authentication.

Are there any compelling p2p email apps for business out there? If you find a good one, let us know. We’ll check it out.

While we’re waiting, let’s review Item Six from Marcus Ranum’s modern classic, The Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security:

Action is Better Than Inaction.
It really is easier to not do something dumb than it is to do something smart. The trick is, when you avoid doing something dumb, to make sure your superiors know you navigated around a particularly nasty sand-bar and that you get appropriate credit for being smart. Isn’t that the ultimate expression of professional kung-fu? To get credit for not doing anything?!

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