Melon Mail Updated: Send Emails Directly to Ethereum Addresses!

It has been quite some time since we first introduced Melon Mail to you in November 2017. Since then, we have made huge updates to Melon Mail that we are now ready to share with the community.

Before we get to the details, here's a quick TL;DR for anyone who missed previous posts about Melon Mail:

Melon Mail is a secure messaging service we created with the guys from Decenter, completely open source under GPL v3. It is fully decentralized and all information exchanged through Melon Mail is end-to-end encrypted, with the correspondence info saved in the form of an Ethereum smart contract on the blockchain and the actual data stored on IPFS.

While the application was fully functional in its previous version, some things were still holding it back from showing its full potential, one of which was that we used MetaMask to communicate with Ethereum addresses and the blockchain. Now this is where our updates come into play.

Firstly, we made it possible to send emails directly to Ethereum addresses while moving away from using MetaMask in the process and making Melon Mail a standalone app. We believe this is a world first and we think it’s very cool.

In practice, this means that you can send an email using Melon Mail to any Ethereum address, and the owner of the address will have the email waiting for them whenever they log into Melon Mail, even if they never used it before. The only limitation is that you cannot send to addresses that haven’t previously made any transactions, but that’s simply because the public keys corresponding to these addresses haven’t been broadcast yet.

Secondly, since Melon Mail is now a completely standalone app, it’s now also fully mobile compatible and, although the UI isn’t completely polished for mobile just yet, it definitely works.

Finally, on top of all this, we also added the option of sending an email to multiple addresses at once, something that was missing in the previous version, to make Melon Mail a truly viable secure messaging solution.

All of this is available in Melon Mail today and you can head on over to Melon.email to try it out. And, although it was primarily designed to be a secure communication channel between Melonport managers and investors, there are no limitations in-place as to who can actually use it.

We’d love to hear your thoughts, so please do share all feedback in the comments!

This blog post is subject to change as the research & development phase is ongoing. Melonport will aim to update blog-posts regularly to represent our latest thinking on a best-efforts basis but there may occasionally be time-lags between latest thinking and updated documentation. With this in mind, the author of this blog assumes no responsibility or liability for any errors or omissions in the content of this blog.