On Wed, Nov 20, 2024 at 02:10:42PM -0500, Miles Fidelman via mailop wrote: > Hi Folks, > > Not really sure where to ask this question, so I'll start here.
> I've been thinking of migrating our mail infrastructure to a virtual > server, running in the Web3 IPFS cloud - without having a physical IP > address attached to it. > The obvious question becomes: How do I publish an address to it? How do I > set up an MX record to point to a socket listener that has nothing but an > IPFS CID to identify it? I can set up a DNS_Link TXT record, pointing to > an IPNS record - but MX records have to resolve to an FQDN. > Any thoughts? Any thoughts on where to ask the question? It won't work, mainly because you seem to misunderstand SMTP, IPFS, or possibly both. Firstly, SMTP. As you have already discovered, MX records point at hostnames. Without checking the RFCs, I suspect it's not technically required for these hostnames to be DNS-resolvable into IP addresses and that alternative schemes (such as onion addresses) are permitted, but of course SMTP clients need to know how to connect to your mailserver. So if you expect to receive mail from the world, you need a publicly-routed IPv4 address with a SMTP server listening on port 25, to which you point MX and A records in the conventional manner, and this is going to remain the case for the forseeable future. Meanwhile, IPFS is a somewhat overcomplex and brittle suite of protocols for assembling a file-serving CDN from. Apart from that the public IPFS network is basically a volunteer-effort thing so it's slow and unreliable, its job is the *distribution* of files in a similar manner to HTTP, and is very much not a mail server or a hosting provider or service upon which you can build a mail server: suppose that you could convince the entire world to understand your novel DNS record and speak IPFS, now what? I suppose they could upload the email to the network as a file, but how does the recipient know that they've been sent a mail and what its IPFS CID is so they can retrieve it from the server? It's just the wrong tool for the job. This is the sort of hare-brained idea which could only make sense after seriously overdosing on blockchain fumes. _______________________________________________ mailop mailing list mailop@mailop.org https://list.mailop.org/listinfo/mailop
