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rewrite landing page introduction

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Plainer, less list-driven prose; drop protocol jargon from the intro.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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randogoth 2026-10-06 12:06:29 +03:00
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# smolmail # smolmail
A minimalist, cypherpunk mail protocol. Fun, simple, decentralised, end-to-end encrypted. A small decentralised mail protocol with cypherpunk leanings, encrypted end to end. It is simple enough that writing your own client is an afternoon of fun.
Online correspondence reduced to an address, a key and a message. You get an address, a key and a message. That's all there is to it.
Five operations, four primitives, zero extensibility mechanisms. One 32-byte master key as the only identity. No certificates, no CAs, no expiry: one round trip and the server's key pin are the entire trust model. A fresh key seals every message: untraceable, unforgeable, and safe by construction. There are five operations and no way to add more. Underneath sit four cryptographic primitives that have been around long enough to be boring. Your identity is a single 32-byte key, and that key is the only thing you ever have to back up. Nothing expires, and nobody vouches for anybody: you pin a server's key the first time you connect, and from then on your client only has to check that it still matches.
Anti-spam without censorship: quotas and tokens do the filtering, and servers never see a word. Clients talk directly to the recipient's server. Registration is bound to one server by proof-of-possession. Double-signed certificate chains move a username to a new key, and old keys keep receiving until every contact catches up. Each message is sealed with a key that exists for that message alone and is discarded straight after, which leaves nothing behind to trace or to forge.
Keeping spam out does not require anyone to read your mail. Every mailbox has a limit on how much it will hold, and a stranger needs a token from you before the server will accept their message. The server can turn mail away, but it cannot open it. Your client talks straight to the recipient's server, with nothing in between.
Your name is yours on that server because you signed for it with your key, and nobody without that key can claim it. If you ever have to switch keys, your old key signs over to the new one and your name follows. Messages still sent to the old key arrive as before, so contacts can catch up in their own time.
## Send your first message ## Send your first message