IPFS storage: benefits to users
The Introduction mentions that mail bodies are stored on the Interplanetary File System (IPFS) rather than on-chain or on a provider’s servers. This page goes into why that choice matters to you as a user, not just as an implementation detail.
Why not just store mail on a server?
Traditional email storage is single-source: your provider’s servers hold the only copy your client ever talks to. If that provider goes down, changes its terms, or decides to suspend your account, your mail history goes with it. IPFS removes that single point of failure and control:
- Content-addressed integrity. Every piece of mail is fetched by a content identifier (CID) — a hash of the content itself — rather than by location. If even one byte of a message changed, its CID would change too, so a CID is a built-in tamper check: what you fetch is cryptographically guaranteed to be what was originally pinned.
- No single company holds your mail. Content on IPFS can be pinned by any number of independent nodes, including ones you run yourself. Nobody needs to trust one operator’s servers to keep a message retrievable.
- You can run the storage layer too. SithBit’s IPFS support is self-hostable, not a hosted-only service tied to one provider — see sithbit-ipfsd: the IPFS pin daemon for running your own node, and the shared-bucket cluster model in Scaling out for pooling several nodes’ worth of resilience.
- Retrieval isn’t locked to a vendor’s API. Because IPFS is an open protocol, any compatible node — SithBit’s embedded implementation or any other IPFS client — can fetch a pinned message by its CID. Your mail isn’t trapped behind one company’s private storage format.
Encryption still does the privacy work
IPFS content is addressed by its hash, not access-controlled — a CID that leaks is fetchable by anyone who has it. SithBit accounts for this: mail bodies are encrypted by the sender (see Mailbox Keys) before they’re ever pinned, so what actually lives on IPFS is ciphertext. IPFS supplies decentralized, integrity-checked availability; encryption supplies confidentiality. Neither one substitutes for the other.