@k @andrewwet @dansup

technically it's a chat app built on top of email using PGP for the E2EE encryption. It could work with any email account / service, but it's best to use the specialized ChatMail server deployment as it is optimized for this use case. Nobody needs to know it's email underneath. That's the magic part about it. It just works, and it works great.

The ChatMail deployment is optimized for latency and as much metadata and logging as possible is scrubbed from the server and the messages. It's very well done.

Their architecture also allows self-hosted servers to transparently integrate with their push notification service so unlike self-hosted XMPP push notifications to your device just works. No logs are retained and the push notifications have no identifying info.

Additionally they've implemented direct P2P connectivity bypassing the email servers and the WebXDC "apps" they've designed can use this functionality too. You could build little games and utilities that you can publish into a chat and users can open them and interact in realtime. It's super neat.

Additionally, because it's built upon email standards, it can't easily be blocked. An ISP or nation state would have to block all email access to everyone to stop it. But email's too important so it's not feasible to break that part of the internet for your citizens.

Finally, it's very low resource usage. You can host like thousands of user accounts on a Raspberry Pi if you wanted.