When talking about Digital Sovereignty, most people refer to file formats, document storage, cloud services and messengers. There is, however, one crucial tool that many don’t have on screen: e-mail.
Its underlying standards like SMTP and IMAP reach back to many decades ago, with some more recent developments like DMARC and MTA-STS. E-mail could be considered one of the world’s first federated messengers, is usually business-critical and the hosting market is dominated by a very few big players. They tend to impose their own rules and often create some sort of lock-in effect, just like proprietary software and closed document formats do.
In this talk, I will explain why proper e-mail handling is more important than ever, point out various options from self-hosting to cloud providers, and raise awareness of that one service that is too often not on the roadmap for Digital Sovereignty.
