I run my own private email server, self-hosted. I run 2 different servers: on a standard machine and on a NAS.
I think slowly email servers are dying.
Very few communication is done through email nowadays.
Nostr could replace it somehow but corporations will still use it.
BTW, if you really want to send a private message to a peer you can use keysend through LN.
I hope we will see soon an "email like" UI based on nostr.
Just imagine running a private NOSTR relay, for your corporation.
Nostr is like email in many ways, I have thought the same myself... An email client could easily check if an email address is a nip05 and upgrade the message
Spam cat and mouse games would be a problem all over again though, but if Nostr had sufficient traction as a social graph first that would make it a very compelling replacement.
spam can be handle it with some new NIP that will force to pay to the destination a x amount in order to receive the "email like" message.
Call it here nostr:npub180cvv07tjdrrgpa0j7j7tmnyl2yr6yr7l8j4s3evf6u64th6gkwsyjh6w6
I think that's undue friction and overhead at a per message level, whereas economically sound relays would be part of the social graph and whitelisted for forwarding messages.
Paid relays > paid messages
Same principle though, free doesn't work
I could receive free messages over public free relays.
But important ones could be over private nostr relays, maintained by myself or my trusted peers with which I maintain a certain volume of private messages.
Private relays could be configured also to be free for trusted peers. For others could be configured to be pay-to-send-msg.
Paying to send a message could be a subset of relay whitelisting into a social graph in that context... tiering like this would actually be consistent with QoS principles already used on the internet
my relay already by default (actually, i don't plan on changing this) doesn't allow reading of messages of a sensitive nature without being party to the conversation
yes, such a protocol could exist, i'm not 100% sure yet but i am pretty sure that you can, in principle, make a relay require an immediate zap in order to release an authentication lock
