Safenet account comes with an email?

Hi Everybody,

When we get the network up and running and we create a user account for it, does it come with an the option of creating your own email? Like for instance now we create andre@gmail.com on the WWW, would we be allowed to create our emails like andre@safenetwork.com or whatever other prefix the network puts as a default?

Looking forward to your answer.

Thanks,
Andre

Yes and no. There will be email apps for SAFE network. In fact, one of the SAFE demo apps is an email app. But it is a separate email system than what currently exists.

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When you create an account you provide an account secret and password that are never shared, but are used to generate a cryptographic key used to access your data.

Safe does not include any form of public identity, and email is not even part of core network (just data storage).

It is up to application developers to publish apps that will provide things like messaging etc, and (potentially) up to each app separately to define any sort of public address for you to exchange data with other users.

Personally, this concerns me quite a bit, as I have always felt one of the biggest architectural flaws in the original Internet was a lack of identity management.

I am hoping that early developers have the foresight to collaborate on how to define and shared identity schemas/personas so we don’t end up with the mess of having separate identities for every app (unless as a user you choose that), but since the Safe demo apps all create separate identities a lot of devs will follow that example.

In all honesty, they probably won’t, and this will end up being a huge missed opportunity for Safe :frowning:

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@arsnebula Have you missed the launcher app demo?

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I know about the app launcher and how it works, and it a) doesn’t answer the question posed by @andreruigrok, and b) doesn’t in any way solve the problem I am describing.

But, thank you for sharing that link, it is good information for new people on the forum to understand the details of how Safe handles auth/auth. However, auth/auth is only a part of a proper identity management solution, and I see that being a big problem for Safe in the future.

I agree having a set of identities with a standard schema including image, name, nickname etc would be good, then there could be extensions to this schema that different apps might support. When you go to for example a new discussion group, it should then be easy to choose to either attach an existing identity or create a new one. Once an identity is attached to an app or site, it should us that identity by default, but it should also be easy to change.

For example someone who is playing world of warcraft might want to create an identity that includes the nickname and image of the game character and use that identity everywhere where world of warcraft is being discussed.

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When you create a SAFE account the system generate several credential including a public MAID (Maidsafe ID) and a public MPID (Maidsafe public ID).

It is still not decided, but possibly each account will have associated three different public IDs.

https://github.com/maidsafe/safe_client_libs/blob/master/src/core/client/user_account.rs

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@andreruigrok my understanding is yes you will have the ability to use a public id that is associated with your account like an email address, but that this is not a way of connecting to the existing email network.

So with a SAFE account you will be part of a new secure anonymous communications system (email, chat etc) much like but not connected to alternative systems such as email, IRC, Slack etc. SAFE has messaging built in, public ids built in, but the user interface will be built on top of these like the old style email clients. Anyone will be able to create an email app, or a chat app, but how well these talk to each other will depend on developers creating or adhering to standards.

I think this is incorrect, or at least misleading because you will have public ids which you can share and will act as email addresses. We even have a demo email so that uses them for this purpose, so I think it would be unhelpful to leave your response as it is. Also secure, anonymous messaging is built in, not just storage.

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Would be useful to have a standard for optionally attaching basic profile information to an identity though. I suppose that could be just an identity management app, wouldn’t need to be made by maidsafe either. The point though is to have a way to avoid filling out profile information many times.

Thank you very much happy being and all the other that answered my post.

Happy Being you clarified it for me, thank you very much for your help!

All the best,
Andre

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Just in addition to all the information already provided, you could be able to do things like that, e.g. just to match your example email address, you could register “com” as one of your public IDs (if you happen to be the first one doing it ofc :slight_smile: ), and then create a service named “andre.safenetwork”, so you can then receive emails at “andre.safenetowrk.com”.
With the latest version of the email app you can already register your email ID as “andre.safenetwork.com” and it internally does exactly what I described above. The idea is to demonstrate you can have a website at “mypage.com” as well as an email ID at “myemail.com”.

Thank you Bochaco, that was very helpful :+1:

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