Super Contacts

Modern social networks like Facebook & Twitter solve the problem of displaying the most recently up to date contact info, avatars, and email addresses by centralizing all of the relevant profile data each time a client requests anything from the app. One of Mailpile's core goals is decentralization, so clearly a profile sync server is out of the question. This is another reason we are not using CardDav to achieve this goal as it relies on a centralized server. Note, we will probably end up supporting CardDav sync with a plugin as there is definitely demand for it.

Email, being beautifully decentralized, makes for interesting opportunities & solutions for this problem. The easiest solution such as: immediately sending emails that updating everyone in your address when you change anything, is not good due to the highly spammy nature. After some discussion, we have outlined a lose flow that we think solves this problem in a persistent (but not spammy way) while maintaining the beautifully decentralized nature of email.

DRAFTS WORKS IN PROGRESS

• I e-mail you, my key and VCard are attached and a header says "I am a Mailpile compatible address book"
• • This could happen A) always, B) manually or C) based on some clever heuristics
• • Automatically attach details to messages sent to new people we haven't contacted before
• • Include a tickbox in the composer to manually toggle that on or off.
• • We keep a list of the last 500 people to get sent keys/cards, and when people drop off the list they become candidates for getting things again.
• Your mailpile sees the attachments, offers to update keychain and address book
• You say yes, and tick a little box that says "subscribe to updates" or "keep up to date automatically"
• Your mailpile sends a specially formatted e-mail back to me, requesting a subscription to my key and contact info
• Time passes
• I update my photo and add a new address in my Mailpile
• Might want manual action "We noticed you updated your profile. Do you want to notify your subscribers of this update?"
• An updated VCard is sent to you automatically
• Victory!