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Flux, a tiny protocol that rethinks email from the ground up

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Hi HN,I have been experimenting with a messaging protocol called FLUX. The goal is to explore what email might look like if it was designed today instead of in the 1980s.FLUX tries to simplify a few things that feel complicated in the current email stack. Identity is based on cryptographic keys instead of usernames and passwords. Messages are signed and verified automatically. The transport is real time and does not depend on the traditional SMTP relay model.The current implementation is small and meant as a prototype. The whole server is only a few hundred lines of Python so the protocol is easy to read and experiment with.Repo: https://github.com/levkris/flux-protocolI am mostly interested in feedback on the protocol design. What problems would appear in a real deployment. What parts are unnecessary. What would need to exist for something like this to actually work on the open internet.Thanks for taking a look. levkris (wokki20)

HN · launched Mar 8, 2026 · 12 upvotes (top 36%) · 0 views

Niche: network and communication protocol libraries · 70 launches, 5 in the last 7 days · Explore this niche →

Category and tags
  • Horizontal
  • Communication
  • Developer
  • Not AI
  • Hobby / open-source project

Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗

More like this: all 70 launches in network and communication protocol libraries →

Could you build this?

No Designing and implementing a novel cryptographic communication protocol intended to rethink the email architecture involves distributed consensus, cryptography, identity management, and network protocol design.

What it would actually take: A functional messaging protocol requires defined wire formats, cryptographic identity schemes (public key infrastructure or decentralized identifiers), transport relays, and spam-prevention mechanisms. The core difficulty lies in protocol security proofs, distributed routing/federation, and resisting abuse (Sybil and spam attacks) without centralized authority. This requires deep expertise in cryptography, distributed systems, and protocol design.

Discussion

8 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: Exchange, Gmail, SMTP

Concerns raised: Adoption chicken-and-egg problem without interoperability, No backward compatibility with existing email infrastructure, Rapid version churn suggests lack of thoughtful design, Unclear path to adoption given billions of existing email users, Complex key-based identity barriers to user onboarding

Feature requests: SMTP bridge for bidirectional interoperability, Pre-authorized sender approval system with pending folder, Human-readable address system as fallback, Email fallback gateway for non-FLUX recipients, Warnings for FLUX features lost outside protocol

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one : 218 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #81 of 219 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 130 days after the earliest competitor.

Related data

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