This is the answer I was hoping for. I know of at least one solution for your ISP concerns. I think it will work very nicely.
ISP's can obviously block anything they want to block. But with bigger bandwidth and things like VOIP services on the rise I would think that means letting some regular customer UDP traffic pass in/out. In your opinion, would you think that most ISP's would not allow customers to keep some long-term UDP "connections" open on any port? I have not had any trouble with this in the places I've tried, but it's hard to know what most ISP's do. Honestly I just can't see any reason they would block a low number of low traffic UDP peer-to-peer connections per customer (the customer's social network), when you consider they are allowing things like Bittorrent which are huge network hogs by comparison and are being blatently used for the sole purpose of downloading bootlegged entertainment media from random strangers.
The interesting thing is that if we can achieve this sort of peer-to-peer social networking, concerns about email servers being online, at least with respect to mail that you send to people on your social network, may turn out to be less of an issue. Why do I say this? Because the reason you want your email servers to always be up is so you can receive mail as timely as possible. Ideally you would like to have near "real-time" mail. Otherwise, if time is not an issue, then storing messages for pickup later on, e.g. in the cloud, should be fine. But if you and I are both on a private peer-to-peer social network, all that's required to send "real-time" email (or whatever format of bits you choose) is that we are both logged in. We might leave low power machines on in order to stay logged in over long periods. I would guess this might be a much more popular form of "email" between friends and family.1 Remember the UNIX programs talk and finger?
1. Obviously there is no spam. The only people who can send and recieve mail to members of the peer-to-peer private social network are those who are logged in. Spammers can't log in. Nor can they be bothered to try to crack their way into myriad disparate small p2p social networks.
ISP's can obviously block anything they want to block. But with bigger bandwidth and things like VOIP services on the rise I would think that means letting some regular customer UDP traffic pass in/out. In your opinion, would you think that most ISP's would not allow customers to keep some long-term UDP "connections" open on any port? I have not had any trouble with this in the places I've tried, but it's hard to know what most ISP's do. Honestly I just can't see any reason they would block a low number of low traffic UDP peer-to-peer connections per customer (the customer's social network), when you consider they are allowing things like Bittorrent which are huge network hogs by comparison and are being blatently used for the sole purpose of downloading bootlegged entertainment media from random strangers.
The interesting thing is that if we can achieve this sort of peer-to-peer social networking, concerns about email servers being online, at least with respect to mail that you send to people on your social network, may turn out to be less of an issue. Why do I say this? Because the reason you want your email servers to always be up is so you can receive mail as timely as possible. Ideally you would like to have near "real-time" mail. Otherwise, if time is not an issue, then storing messages for pickup later on, e.g. in the cloud, should be fine. But if you and I are both on a private peer-to-peer social network, all that's required to send "real-time" email (or whatever format of bits you choose) is that we are both logged in. We might leave low power machines on in order to stay logged in over long periods. I would guess this might be a much more popular form of "email" between friends and family.1 Remember the UNIX programs talk and finger?
1. Obviously there is no spam. The only people who can send and recieve mail to members of the peer-to-peer private social network are those who are logged in. Spammers can't log in. Nor can they be bothered to try to crack their way into myriad disparate small p2p social networks.