Regular email lives on big central servers, and the protocol takes that for granted. DMCN’s doesn’t. Your mail moves as sealed packets between relays that can never open it, and no relay is special — each one can be replaced. Today we run the relays for dmcn.email; because the protocol and a working server are published in the open, you are not stuck with that arrangement. Here’s what that means for you.
A relay only ever holds a sealed packet addressed to a key it doesn’t have. There is no central store of readable mail to hack or hand over — that holds no matter who runs the relay.
Your mailbox is not welded to one machine. If a relay goes offline or is retired, your mail is re-pointed to another and moved across — without you or anyone else re-issuing your identity.
The protocol is published in full and so is a working server, under a permissive license. Anyone can run a node on their own domain — so if we ever stopped being worth trusting, you would not have to wait for our permission to leave.
A decentralized network doesn’t mean a walled garden. DMCN bridges to any regular address, so you can reach anyone — while messages between DMCN inboxes stay end-to-end encrypted. See exactly how →