Proposal for the Development of Premail by Presearch

Proposals
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1. Introduction:

With the increasing demand for data privacy and concerns over centralized data storage, it’s imperative for services to evolve, offering users more control over their personal data. Presearch, as a decentralized search engine, has taken the lead in providing user-centric search solutions, ensuring data privacy, and reducing the dependency on centralized platforms. Taking a step further in this direction, I propose the development of Premail, a decentralized and privacy-focused email provider.

2. Rationale for Premail:

  • Expanding Market Share: A privacy-focused email service can draw users emphasizing online privacy, widening Presearch’s reach.
  • Trust and Reputation: Presearch’s existing trustworthiness makes Premail a natural progression and adds to its credibility.
  • Comprehensive Online Suite: Offering both a search engine and an email service positions Presearch as a holistic solution for online needs.

3. Monetization Strategies for Premail:

  • Freemium Model: Offer a free basic version with premium subscriptions granting more features and storage.
  • Secure Ad Platform: Integrate a privacy-centric ad platform within Premail, with ads based on opted categories without tracking email content.
  • Partnerships: Collaborate with decentralized apps/services for bundled offerings.
  • Value-added Services: Introduce ancillary services like a secure calendar at an extra cost.

4. Integration of Presearch Node Runners in Premail Infrastructure:

  • Distributed Data Storage: Node runners can contribute storage for encrypted email shards, ensuring data security and redundancy.
  • Secure Email Routing: Node runners can verify email transactions and act as email relays, decentralizing the routing process for smoother communication.
  • Spam Filtering and Malware Detection: Utilize node runners for collaborative filtering of incoming emails to detect spam or malware patterns, and maintain decentralized whitelists and blacklists.
  • Continuous Updates and Patch Management: Use nodes for decentralized distribution of updates and patches, with the possibility of community-driven improvements.
  • Token Incentivization for Support: Node runners earn tokens for contributions and can stake tokens to vouch for their reliability and quality of service.

5. Features of Premail:

  • End-to-end Encryption: Encryption at all stages ensures data privacy.
  • Decentralized Storage: Email data stored across nodes ensures no single point of failure.
  • Open Source: An open-source codebase promotes transparency and community trust.
  • Custom Domains: Allow users, especially businesses, their domain names.
  • Interoperability: Compatibility with popular email clients assures seamless transitions for users.

6. Conclusion:

The development of Premail can fortify Presearch’s position in the realm of decentralized web services. The combined emphasis on user privacy, service reliability, and node runner integration paves the way for a groundbreaking email service. By harnessing the decentralization power, Premail is poised to redefine the email landscape, offering unmatched security and privacy.

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Seems like a good idea for a PREmium utility down the road. If you need more storage than the freemium offers you might have to stake more PRE or be charged PRE monthly for X utilization above freemium.

Not sure this is a priority development with everything else that needs to be built out but I would love to have a secure privacy focused email through Presearch at some point.

should it be @premail.com or @presearch.com

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As long as the revenues generated are used to buyback pre or some conversion happens at the transaction event, I think any payment method could be used. We should simplify transacting and use the payment method(s) that individual users are most comfortable with. Presearch should focus on the ethos of decentralization and instill it into its culture, corporate structure, and the products it creates.

I think the domain should be something different from presearch.com and naming it Premail relates it to Presearch while also indicating that it’s mail related. It would be beneficial to have a domain that combines pre and mail, but that could be challenging to acquire.

One way to quickly get to this would be to acquire/merge with Skiff. No idea if they would even be interested, but combining the two entities could provide a large product set that could compete with Google.

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“Decentralized Storage: Storing email data across nodes ensures there is no single point of failure.”

I think that would be a unique selling proposition.
At least I’m not aware of any e-mail provider that offers something like this.

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I like the idea. It would be nice if Presearch would become a real Google alternative.
Decentralized Search (presearch.com) + Decentralized Mail (TBD) + Decentralized Storage / Photos
There are only a few projects building in this direction. Maybe partner with Internext, they have a web3 Google Drive alternative.

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Yeah, I like the idea too. So PreMail becomes a competitor of Proton I guess?

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Presearch had an email that was some kind of experiment from a community member but it was later discontinued, Surely at some point that can be resumed

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All good.
I will comment on the idea that users should be able to use the transacting method they are most comfortable with.
However, the caveat being I think PRE MUST be built into all of these services. This doesn’t preclude them from paying in fiat.

The difference is subtle but very important. simply allowing fiat and not requiring PRE as the platform utility give the team and VC investors too much control over what amount they decide to buy back in PRE. Building PRE into the platform forces the use of PRE on all the premium services and therefore forces the exchange volume.

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IPFS is already on the road map. That will provide the decentralized storage. No one will not like the “mail” idea but it would have to be well down the road i think and certainly to be considered after IPFS node implementation.

This space is also LOADED with established competitors. I currently use Tutanota and pay $1 month and I get 5 email addresses included with end to end encryption and plenty of storage. Proton mail and other “dark web” providers are out there also and deemed very secure.

I also use Tresorit for cloud storage (they also do email) and they use a decentralized and encrypted storage. But Tresorit is VERY high level (and expensive)

Again love the idea and something to be considered for sure down the road

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When PreMail? I Like it!

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That was an experiment that a community member did a few months ago but it is no longer operational, Although it is not a function that is within the roadmap and a priority is something that could be planned at some point, It’s a good idea but only after leaving the most important things

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There is a lot of inertia to overcome to get people to switch email providers. Think about how much of a pain it is to change the email you use at various websites or with friends, family and colleagues. This is something that most users simple are not going to do.

There are a lot of services that google (and others) provide that are far less sticky and likely have much better margins that we should focus on. It would not surprise me at all to learn that gmail is an actual loss leader for google.

Obviously search is the current focus but if we want to think about other services to recreate to utilize the existing distributed network, cloud storage followed by cloud compute would be the most likely to move the needle from a revenue standpoint.

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Myself and others have been pushing this for a couple years now. Good to see a discussion about it. Here is my two cents and suggestions.

A question was asked in the weekly podcast about on and off ramp registration of users… Something like that which made me think of the Web3 email discussion from a couple years ago.

I think one important thing the current Presearch registration system overlooks is the email address of a user can be used to track a PRE account back to its source especially if the person is using a public email address like Google and if the person used their real name during registration. It’s safe to say there is enough metadata from 30K data points per person through purchasable, publicly available, metadata companies, like shopping reward card aggregation companies for example that sell their data or turn it over without question to third parties, possibly allowing an email address to be linked and tracked back to a PRE account holder. The only safe way to do onboarding and login of users is with a web3 registration and login system that gives users a web3 email address on the blockchain. This makes the registered user much more anonymous over a web3 email and much harder to link a Presearch registered account holder to that web3 email and blockchain login especially if no blockchain transactions of tokens are ever performed on that blockchain address and if the user only uses the email and web3 blockchain address for logging into Presearch.

A blockchain address, web3 email, or internal email that has been used for a custodial wallet, or used to send transactions to an exchange requiring KYC where the email has been used can also link a PRE account back to the registered user using readily available, purchasable metadata. The current method of allowing users to register with public emails is a hole in the security and anonymous search vision of Presearch in my opinion and could be used against our mission of not collecting or providing data of users to third parties. Justin and myself, and later the team pursued this avenue through meetings with a couple companies about a year ago but the technology was not ready with the first company and the second company, Skiff, fell through and later signed a contract with Brave. It may be time to pursue this again with monetization in mind as I will explain further below.

I would like the team to pick up where Justin and I, and other members have left off and pursue this further for a solution that provides 3 things. 1. A web3 login for registered users, 2. A partnership with a web3 email company that can also provide the team access to communications with those web3 email users through an administrator account. OR 3. Building our own (However a partnership with existing infrastructure will be much faster)

During our pursuit of this we threw around a couple scenarios. 1. A free web3 email that provided a sticky utility for users just like Gmail provides, which as part of the free service, allows Presearch to monetize these emails with offers. OR 2. Providing access through a third party web3 email provider to Presearch registered users as a subscription service while charging a small premium over the actual cost from the email provider which in turn provides revenue for Presearch.

The goal is to give each registered user an @presearchmail dot com email address which in turn, just by having the Corporate name in the email, nudges millions of eyeballs on the receiving end to ask the question… What is @presearchmail dot com??? Which in turn leads them to the domain. A signature line with the registered users referral link could also be included by default unless removed or revised by the user which is exactly how Protonmail does it.

I registered presearchmail dot com before anyone else could in order to protect it from being snatched up by competitors just so you know. I am willing to negotiate it’s safe return. :smile:

There are other options like premail dot com or pmail dot com etc., however; having the full name of the company in the URL which leads to brand awareness is the key. Any domain other than presearchmail dot com just will not gain the brand recognition in my opinion.

Being a total internet security freak In a world of constant violations of privacy has had me thinking about this login issue for a while. It only makes sense to protect our users in the most secure fashion with web3 registrations and logins plus web3 blockchain email accounts for communication while monetizing the upgrade at the same time.

Now this is not to say that using the same web3 email address in association with interactions of companies that require registration would not also link you to a Presearch account but at least there will be no username required at registration which means Presearch will not be able to provide any information. Plus all communications will be on the blockchain and encrypted and not accessible without a private key. By going with a third party the web3 email is also provided on a third party block chain which means you will truly have no information about users.

Other than Skiffmail mentioned above, here are the links to the other two Web3 Email Service Providers:

I believe all three of these allow a company to use their own domain name.

Final suggestion… Give us at least 5 url links in a post. Limiting it to 2 is ridiculous. I had to edit this 6 times before I could post and use the words dot com instead of the actual url.

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We can offer a web3 email for free and monetize it with partner ads or for a subscription and monetize it with a small fee over the actual cost from the third party provider. With most of the third party providers I mention below we can use our own domain name and all it requires is installation of a small snippet of code and we can have web3 login and email tomorrow. So unless we are hell bent on doing this from scratch then I see no reason for the holdup. If nothing else this web3 login and email can be used exclusively by the user for logging in and communicating with Presearch only for added security on the platform. If a user chooses to use the web3 email in communications outside of Presearch that would allow meta data of the user to be associated with the Presearch user then that is on them. Getting people to change emails is hard but if explained correctly, how using this web3 login and email only with Presearch and in personal communications and not for account registration with third parties then this would make a user account very secure from third party intervention and allow Presearch the piece of mind that they truly have no information to share which is the whole point of having a privacy search engine in the first place.

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A couple questions and a comment.

Is the free version or the paid version an option that must be chosen up front by Presearch or could they offer potential customers the option and advertising only to the free accounts while paid accounts remain clean and free of ads?

Have any of these services been thoroughly vetted and code reviewed by reputable 3rd parties? Are any open sourced?

What is the average price for web3 email? If this is eventually pursued the cost should have an option to be paid in PRE or fiat based on a $ amount plus a premium for presearch? With higher PRE price one could use PRE income to pay for the service.

Are emails on web3 actual transactions on chain? Meaning you need to confirm any email sends as a transaction while receives I assume just come through just like receiving funds in a crypto account?

My comment is based on this

I agree that there are services that could tie emails to other information but I disagree that it is a hole in presearch security.

  1. if you ever use your new presearch mail with anything that would end up being the same as your regular non web3 email or in contrast for security purposes if you setup a new non-web3 email and never use it for anything but presearch this would provide similar anonymity.

  2. your username or email is never broadcasted or connected with any of your presearches. That is the whole point of the design; your query goes to a gateway node which strips any personal data then the decentralized nodes take the sanitized hashed query to retrieve search and AI results from various providers and returned to the gateway then back to you. The actual query results can’t be traced back to a user by google or any other API. All those entities see are a bunch of queries from a bunch of decentralized nodes. And if Presearch code for the gateway nodes strips information and never stores anything other than the hash of the search query itself and the time of a search the only thing that presearch would have is a list of all search queries not saved to be tied to a time or a user and separately a list of times a logged user conducts a search but not what was searched. (At least this is how I understand it to work)

I don’t think an email username is a security vulnerability for searches and who cares if someone knows you use presearch instead of google as long as your searches are by design secure and anonymous.

I do like the idea generally especially if there is in fact an open source vetted web3 provider that we could partner with and it would not cost presearch anything.

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Yes. That could be an option. The free accounts get advertising while the paid accounts can opt out of advertising. Also the paid accounts would have more email storage.

I believe they are all open source or at least a couple of them.

Yes. An option to pay in PRE from one’s account would be a plus.

From by brief interaction with my Skiff email account, it works just like regular email. No confirmation required for sending and receiving, just for logging in with a web3 wallet.

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I read through the documentation of some of the links you provided and some services are only compatible on chain meaning you can ONLY send to other emails that are on that chain or using that service. Great for security and privacy but seems like an issue that would need to be solved to use as a primary email. I am sure there are some services that have solved this.

Thanks for the info.