Hi!
A few weeks ago, in this post, we’ve introduced CLI for Eppie — an encrypted p2p email. Today we’d like to focus a little bit on the GUI application, which we have also made available on GitHub. If you’ve read the previous post, you might want to skip the introduction and jump straight to the How to section. The rest of you, if you’re into decentralized applications and care about data privacy — read on.

So, what is Eppie?

Eppie is an open protocol encrypted p2p email and decentralized identity provider. It is currently in development, and we have recently begun this public testing. When released, Eppie will feature web3-grade privacy with full account and data ownership granted to users. It is capable of receiving direct messages from conventional IMAP/SMTP email, as well as connecting to multiple existing decentralized networks, like Ethereum or Bitcoin. It is intuitive and easy to use, like any other email client — and unlike most of the web3 applications we’ve seen.

Technically Eppie will be storing the data on IPFS infrastructure and using SBBS as a default transport layer. But the architecture allows to easily plug in multiple storage and transport technologies. Eppie’s e2e encryption is based on Elliptic-curve cryptography. GUI application is being written in C# with Uno. At the moment, GUI application works exclusively on Windows, but later we’ll add support for macOS, Linux, iOS, and Android platforms.

State of development

The p2p part is still in development. Although p2p messaging does work on the testnet, it is not yet an actually decentralised network — just a few nodes we run in a cloud. Meanwhile, Eppie works as a conventional email client supporting all major email providers e.g. Google or Microsoft Outlook. The local account is created using a Seed Phrase according to BIP39 standard and owned exclusively by the user. There are additional security features like PGP support and the ability to authenticate at Proton Mail servers (which none of the existing desktop clients can do by the way).

Here’s a list of features available now:

• Creating a local account using a Seed Phrase according to BIP39 standard
• PGP encryption support (WIP)
• Connecting any number of third-party email accounts (e.g. Gmail. Microsoft Outlook etc.)
• Connecting Proton Mail account
• Creating a local backup
• Viewing mailboxes & reading messages
• Writing & sending messages

New features will be added as the core application matures.

Why would you need to give it a try? It might be interesting to those who wish to contribute to Eppie development (which would make us happy to the Moon and back 🥳). You might also want to try the p2p messaging as soon as it’s ready, and installing Eppie now, and updating it frequently, is certainly a way to go. Finally, you can use it with your Gmail, or Outlook with PGP client-side encryption. Or have your Proton Mail with the only available desktop client. The possibilities are not endless but substantial.

How to

The easiest way to get Eppie is to install from Windows Store. Here's the link.

Also you can download the installer from Github releases.

To build Eppie from source, you'll need Windows 10 or later.
Install Visual Studio 2022 with these workloads and components:

• .Net Multi-platform App UI development
  • Android SDK setup (with Android SDK Platform 31)
  • .NET profiling tools
  • Xamarin
• Windows application development
  • Universal Windows Platform tools
  • Windows 11 SDK (10.0.22621.0)
  • Windows 10 SDK (10.0.19041.0)

Now clone this repository:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/Eppie-io/Eppie-App.git eppie-app

To build the project open the src/Eppie.App/Eppie.App.sln file in the Visual Studio. Set the Eppie.App.UWP project as your starting project and select x64 platform. Start building the solution (Visual Studio Menu: Build ➤ Build Solution).

To launch the Eppie.App.UWP project chose Visual Studio Menu: Debug ➤ Start Debugging.

What else

As I’ve mentioned earlier, we would greatly appreciate contributions, so everyone is welcome to our GitHub. And don’t forget to give us some stars ⭐ — it matters a lot to us! Also feel free to leave a comment and ask your questions here. Thanks for reading!