You can now send email right from your Ethereum address

Published at: Sept. 16, 2020

Unstoppable Domains has introduced a new feature — Unstoppable email. Now anyone who owns a domain with a .crypto extension can send email signed by the Ethereum (ETH) private key that controls it. This is reminiscent of how the old cypherpunks used to sign their emails with PGP keys. In the 1990s, an early Bitcoin (BTC) adopter Hal Finney helped develop Pretty Good Privacy or PGP, which allowed users to encrypt various digital mediums, including emails.

Unstoppable Domains co-founder Bradley Kam told Cointelegraph that the email service is not decentralized and is provided through ETHMail Webmail. For now, the service is available for free, and one does not even need to own a .crypto domain to send an email. However, the added benefit for Unstoppable Domain users is that since the email is signed with a private key, it guarantees that the email comes from the specified domain owner:

“You can sign a message with the private key that controls the domain name in order to log into your account. So basically, you know that the person who is sending you the email is the domain.”

Kam said this feature is just another step towards the greater decentralization of the web. Previously the company released a decentralized chat named dChat:

“We were excited about it. And I think just in general, I think messaging is a really big piece of the decentralized web. And so, you saw a decentralized peer-to-peer chat protocol that we built a couple of months back. I think that this is just another tool in that sphere.”

There are over 100 million Ethereum addresses and more addresses are being added every day. However, if spam (from Ethereum-based emails) ever becomes a problem, there is a remedy that stems from another crypto pioneer, Adam Back. His Hashcash was designed precisely for this purpose — preventing spam. An email-sender had to provide a proof-of-work for the outgoing emails. The same concept was later adopted by Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other blockchain-based currencies.

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Decentralization
Technology
Ethereum
Email
Adam Back
Hal Finney
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