gkapkowski
commented
4 years ago Excellent question!
The short answer is that world where there is nothing like ETHMail didn't make sense to me.
I wanted to allow people to reach out even in situation where all they have is the other person ethereum address. Imagine when you browse etherscan or look at some dapp, you can find interesting address doing interesting stuff, eg. deploying smart contracts that look exactly like what you wanted to do, or owning the one NFT token that you just need to have but can't find it on any auction, etc. There is no guarantee that the other person is using ETHMail and that they will see your message but you CAN leave them a message. When they decide to login for the first time, your message will be waiting for them.
This was my main motivation, enable communication between people who found each other on the blockchain.
My other motivations were more esoteric:
- NFTs mailboxes - mailbox that is accessible only to given token owner
- Token Newsletters - community newsletter available to owners of certain tokens.
- Spam filtering - filter incoming messages by sender token ownership and history of transactions
I also wanted to use existing technologies, so that ETHMail is compatible with what people currently use.
There is also cryptoauth.io. When implementing Open ID Connect protocol I needed to provide user email, this email would be used by already existing products and software. It had to be compatible with what email is currently. Since Cryptoauth uses Ethereum address as identity and doesn't require users to "register" anywhere, ETHMail also had to work like this.
And to directly answer you question "Why should I route my email through ethmail?". Please don't. Don't use ETHMail as if it was your (you as a person) email. Use it as a gateway that people can use to contact you without reviling yourself. You can import all email coming to ETHMail to your normal email account and use it from email clients you already use (I use ETHMail account with my Gmail mobile app) Use ETHMail when you need to send email to someone "outside" (eg. to someone@gmail.com) to prove that you control given address. It should be simpler than sending them signed messages and expecting them to verify on their own that the signature is valid and coming from the right address.
I also hope that Dapps will stop asking people about their real-life emails just because they want to send them marketing information.
jpritikin
This seems like a good idea, but it would help to add a list of motivations somewhere. Why should I route my email through ethmail?