So there's already a system that until very recently did peer-to-peer
delivery of messages over encrypted channels between hosts that
participated in a peer-to-peer overlay. It was Skype.
And none of these proposed solutions are viable until there's a solve
for the very reason that Skype is moving away from P2P technology... and
that is that the majority of the billions of new users joining the
Internet over the next few years are doing so with the only
Internet-accessing device they have: a mobile phone. When they're on
WiFi, the bandwidth is good, but they sleep most of the time even in
that case to preserve their otherwise meager battery life... and when
they're on 3G/4G, the bandwidth isn't as good and it can be very
expensive, and it burns the battery up even faster.
These users want to be able to send and receive messages when their
device is on, but the recipient's device isn't. Because most of the
time, the recipient's device, even if they put it in their pocket 10
seconds ago, is already asleep, trying to preserve as much battery as
possible.
That pretty much eliminates all designs that do direct transfer from
sender to receiver, irrespective of the traffic analysis risks of doing so.
Additionally, it also means that nearly all the participant nodes are
also unable to participate in a peer-to-peer overlay network, because
they can't afford the network uptime (and consequent battery drain)
necessary.
So we're back to fetching the email off of servers, and just having the
paths between the servers be over this magical new peer-to-peer network.
Only that's already approximately what we have now.
Oh, and those servers can do interesting things you can't do at the
receiver nearly so well, like correlate likely spam between recipients
and drop it... or detect viruses before they're delivered, and drop those.
Matthew Kaufman
ps. And then there's the other unsolved problem: If you do actually
build a popular service that lets people securely exchange messages, the
government comes with an order to reveal the content of the messages,
and threats to lock up the principals if those demands aren't met. I
wish I could tell you more stories about this, but of course I'm subject
to the same sorts of non-disclosure that everyone else who's ever gotten
one of those is.
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