My Home is My Post-Office: Evaluation of a decentralized email architecture on Internet-of-Things low-end device

Abstract

Users predominantly access their email via mobile devices. This presents a two-fold challenge to the email applications. First, email's update from multiple devices has to be eventually reconciled with the server. Prioritization of updates is difficult and maybe undesirable. Solving this problem requires a data store with the complete history of email changes. Second, legacy email protocols don't provide an optimal email synchronization and access in mobile environment. In this paper we are proposing to take advantage of the Internet of Things (IoT) phenomena. In IoT environment a user may have multiple interconnected in-home low-end devices with publicly accessible address. In this architecture we move the email application from the central service into user's in-home and mobile devices, store complete email history on each device, and replace legacy IMAP and SMTP protocols with a synchronization protocol found in Distributed Version Control Systems(DVCS). This addresses the email reconciliation issue, optimizes the bandwidth usage, and intrinsically puts the user in control of her data. We analyze a number of stores and synchronization implementations and compare them with the open source Dovecot email server.Comment: 9 pages, 15 figures, 1 table, ICC'17, Cambridge, U