@elettrona@poliversity.it I am not well-versed in email technology. I am confused, even today, by what a mail transfer agent (MTA) and mail user agent (MUA) are.

But... I think this is doable.

For example, my handle julian@activitypub.space is only a fediverse handle. I have not set up email on that domain. It is theoretically possible to set up a ~~MUA~~ MTA (~~gosh I hope I am using that term right~~ nope I did not) to accept the email, and display it to me.

But do I want to blur the lines and have my social media also become my email reader... I am not so sure :sweat_smile:

I don't think it's possible:

- you need to have an email set of the recipient side, binding the user@domain.tld to an ActivityPub identity (doable)
- but you also must have the same binding on the sender side: the email used must also have an ActivityPub related identity (maybe doable)
- then when you receive an email response, you have to forge an ActivityPub message from the sender's identity, that only him can create. (impossible)

You can probably do it, but I'm not sure how many users you'd get, as I think that it'd be a less-usable interface.

• You'd need some way to handle voting; that doesn't intrinsically show up. Maybe you could do it via expecting users to send specially-structured emails.
• If by "fediverse" you specifically are talking about the Threadiverse --- Lemmy, Piefed, and Mbin --- then you're going to have to also deal with a lack of a way to handle responding to a given comment (unless you intend to forward all comments to all posts that a user has subscribed to to an email address, and then just only let them respond to those).
• Email isn't natively encrypted, so if that's a concern and you want to deal with that, you'd need something like a PGP key that users could register, I guess.
• Email clients don't, as far as I know --- I haven't gone looking --- natively have Markdown support, so either you need to throw out formatting or have some sort of mapping to and from Markdown to HTML. I don't know if something like pandoc would be sufficient for that.
• No native "report" functionality. Maybe you could do it via expecting users to send specially-structured emails.

If what you want is to take advantage of existing native clients, my suggestion is that you'd probably get more mileage out of doing a bidirectional Usenet-to-Threadiverse gateway than an email-to-Threadiverse gateway. That has a much closer mapping in terms of functionality than email. You could do that a lot more efficiently in terms of bandwidth. Your "Usenet group list" would be a set of community@instance name entries, and you map posts to top level messages, and comments to responses to those.

The major downside there is that I don't think that any Usenet clients have native Markdown support and you still don't have voting or native reporting functionality.

The only obvious benefit I can think of from either Usenet or email is that there are clients for both that support offline functionality, and I don't know of any Threadiverse-native clients that do. I think the major point I'd raise would be "you could probably do it, but...what do you gain that outweighs the drawbacks?" Like, I think that you'd probably get more good out of just picking your favorite native Threadiverse client and adding code to that (or starting a new one, if you absolutely can't stand any of the existing ones).