this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2026
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Idea for experiment: mail to fediverse?

@selfhosted

My ambition: having people writing to "username @ domain dot ext" and mail content goes into public, or private, on fediverse "handle @ domain . ext".

Someone already did it? Pros and cons? Disadvantages are more than benefits?

I heard about a trick called "mail2mastodon" but before doing deeper research I first wanted to understand how the effort is, and if it's worth.

#activitypub #fediverse #howto #mail #selfhosting

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[–] tal@lemmy.today 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

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).