We were really fed up with email. It’s turned into a total sieve on the security front and an absolute nightmare when it comes to spam. So after months of intensive development, we’re proud to introduce PeerBox: the first 100% P2P messaging system that actually works! This isn’t a concept. This isn’t a prototype. It’s software you can run on your machine right now.

The principle is radical: your messages travel straight from your PC to your contact’s PC over the Tor network. No central server. No middleman. No company. No foundation. Just you and the person you’re writing to. Transport runs over SSH, the most battle-tested protocol on the internet, and goes through Tor to guarantee your anonymity. Your data is encrypted with AES-256 inside a vault sitting on your own machine. If anyone tampers with it, everything gets wiped beyond recovery. PeerBox also makes spam structurally impossible, because only the contacts you’ve explicitly accepted can write to you.

Nobody can read your messages. Nobody can intercept them. And most importantly: nobody can be forced to hand them over, because there’s nobody to pressure in the first place.

PeerBox is free software, released fully open source on Codeberg under the AGPL license. It installs automatically on every Debian-based system: Ubuntu, Mint, Pop!_OS, MX, Zorin… For other distributions, you’ll need to install the dependencies by hand. On top of that, it’s accessible from any Android or iOS phone thanks to the PeerBox Server plugin. You install it and you use it. No technical skills required. If you’re not on Linux yet, here’s a great excuse to finally make the jump 🙂

Forget about emails… Now we send peermails!

Reinventing messaging from the ground up, in pure P2P, and making it usable by anyone was a seriously ambitious bet. Plenty of people told us it was impossible. We went ahead and did it anyway 🙂 And today we’re really happy to put the result in your hands.

How did a NovaMag article turn into a privacy-first messaging app?

It all started with an article. I was writing a post for the Open Source section of Novamag on a topic that had been nagging at me for a while. It was about how fragile email really is. The picture was crystal clear. SMTP, the protocol that carries our messages, dates back to 1982. It’s a system over 40 years old that was never designed for security, that’s drowning in spam and piling up new vulnerabilities as the digital world keeps getting more complex. Yet we keep slapping patches onto something that should have been rethought a long time ago.

So while I was writing that article, I started picturing what a proper alternative to classic email would look like. Something robust. Modern. Ultra-secure. No central server. No middleman. I laid out my ideas, and the conclusion wrapped up with a call for developers to turn the concept into reality.

But while rereading the article, something clicked. “Wait a minute… I can actually do this myself!” So I talked it over with some friends. The feedback was unanimous: the project was technically viable! The sticking point was that claiming to reinvent email would probably just get me labeled a crackpot. And a project like that would never get off the ground.

So rather than publishing a theoretical article nobody would take seriously, I decided to write the code and prove the concept could actually work. Within a month, I had a functional prototype in Python. Command-line only, zero frills. But it worked.

Then I called in my colleague Debugman for backup. We ported the prototype to Textual to get a better terminal interface. Basically, something more presentable. At that stage, the plan was to publish it as-is and hope some developers would want to jump on board. Except we got completely hooked on the adventure…

We had ideas piling up and we wanted to make them real. So we told ourselves: let’s go all in! We built a complete graphical interface. We even hired a professional designer for the logo, because we wanted a credible result that didn’t look like some weekend hack. And one thing led to another, each idea pulling the next one along. The plugin system. Local vault encryption. The secure invitation system. Mobile access. Multilingual translations. We just couldn’t stop.

So the Novamag article got scrapped 😀 But something much better took its place: a real, ready-to-use piece of software.

Why you absolutely need P2P email to protect your privacy

Security rule number one: never trust a middleman! Before getting into the details of how PeerBox works, we need to talk about everything that’s wrong with current messaging systems. And the list is long!

Classic email is a crumbling wreck

SMTP, the protocol that carries your emails, dates back to 1982. It was never designed with security in mind. Back then, the internet was a trust network between universities. Nobody imagined that one day billions of people would use it to exchange sensitive information.

The result is that when you send an email through Gmail, Outlook or Yahoo… your messages pass through their servers in plain text. These companies scan them, analyze them, and monetize them. It’s written in black and white in their terms of service, but nobody reads those. And any authority can get the contents of your inbox through a simple court order. Sometimes even without one…

ProtonMail: we like them, but…

Proton is probably the best mainstream email service when it comes to privacy. We have no problem acknowledging that. End-to-end encryption between Proton users, servers in Switzerland, open source code. On paper, it’s solid.

But Proton is still a centralized middleman. And that’s exactly where the cracks start to show. In 2021, Proton handed over a French activist’s IP address to the authorities following a legal request. They obeyed the law. They didn’t really have a choice. But it proves that when there’s an entity in the middle, that entity can be forced to reveal your information. Today it’s an IP address, or even your messages outright. Tomorrow, if the law changes or the pressure gets strong enough, it could be something else entirely. So yes, Proton is unquestionably better than Gmail. But it’s not the ultimate solution as long as there’s a trusted third party in the equation.

Telegram is total opacity

Telegram is not end-to-end encrypted by default. You have to manually enable “secret chats” to get E2E encryption. How many users actually do that? A tiny minority.

Behind Telegram sits Pavel Durov. A libertarian oligarch whose real motivations remain murky. He’s not exactly Putin’s friend, but not exactly his enemy either. There’s no way to know who he opens doors for, or under what conditions. The server-side code is closed. Nobody can verify what happens to your data once it lands on Telegram’s infrastructure. If you think it’s safe to trust a billionaire who answers to nobody, that’s up to you…

Signal is security’s false friend

Signal is the most interesting case. Because everyone recommends it as the most secure messaging app in the world. And technically, Signal’s encryption protocol really is excellent. But that’s not the question. The real question is: who’s behind Signal, and whose money is funding it?

Signal was developed by Open Whisper Systems with at least 3 million dollars in funding from the Open Technology Fund. The OTF is a program created in 2012 within Radio Free Asia. And Radio Free Asia is an American propaganda outlet set up by the CIA in 1951 to run anti-communist operations in Asia. The OTF’s own website stated that Signal was, and I quote, “originally developed with OTF funding.” This isn’t a conspiracy theory. It’s written in black and white by the very people who funded the project.

And it doesn’t stop there. Katherine Maher, chair of the Signal Foundation board, is a veteran of the National Democratic Institute, where she worked on “Color Revolution” operations in the Middle East and North Africa during the Arab Spring. Meredith Whittaker, president of the Signal Foundation, gives interviews to Lawfare, a think tank tightly linked to the American national security establishment.

And in March 2025, Signal Gate confirmed what many had already suspected: the CIA director himself told the US Senate that Signal is installed on the agency’s computers and used for official communications. Senior US officials even discussed plans for military strikes in Yemen in a Signal group chat. The “world’s most secure messaging app” is the CIA’s daily communication tool. And that doesn’t raise any questions?

Let’s not forget a historical precedent. For decades, a Swiss company named Crypto AG sold “secure” encryption systems to more than 120 governments around the world. It was discovered much later that Crypto AG was secretly controlled by the CIA and German intelligence. It was a gigantic honeypot. Can we say Signal is the Crypto AG of the 21st century? No… But the documented connections between Signal and the American security apparatus are troubling enough that the question deserves to be asked.

And in any case, Signal’s servers sit in the United States. They fall under FISA. Under the Patriot Act. Under National Security Letters, which let the government demand data without the user ever being told.

Android, iOS: a free-for-all on your data

And if you think you’re protected just because you run encrypted messaging on your Android or iOS smartphone, we need to have an honest conversation. Your operating system is built by Google or Apple. Two American companies subject to the same laws and the same pressures. Even with the best encryption in the world, if the layer underneath is compromised, it’s game over! A secure app on top of an insecure OS is completely pointless.

The fundamental centralization problem in computer security

The core issue is simple. If a company, a foundation or any centralized entity offers you a “100% secure” messaging system, all it takes is for an intelligence agency to put the squeeze on that entity to get your data. Blackmail. Court orders. Infiltration. National security letters. It doesn’t matter how. A middleman is always a point of failure, because it makes a prime target for anyone trying to reach your data.

With PeerBox, nobody stands in the middle. Zero centralization. Zero middleman. The code is open source and verifiable by anyone on Codeberg. There’s no company to coerce. No server to seize. No foundation to infiltrate. No link between PeerBox and any third-party service, not even for updates. Just you, your contact, and an encrypted tunnel between your two machines. It’s the only architecture that makes surveillance structurally impossible rather than merely difficult.

Here’s the brief we followed to build PeerBox

Let’s be crystal clear on one point: PeerBox is not a tool reserved for computer security experts. That was our obsession from day one. We really wanted to build a system that someone who has never touched Linux in their life could install and use without any outside help. Mission accomplished!

Installation is guided step by step. The installer handles everything: Tor, SSH, encryption keys, network configuration… You just answer a few simple questions and PeerBox does the rest. Everything happens in a modern graphical web interface. No terminal to open. No commands to type. No configuration files to edit by hand.

For its interface, PeerBox ships with five languages at launch: English, French, German, Spanish and Russian. And if your language isn’t available yet, adding a translation is as simple as editing a JSON file. Anyone can do it, and even submit it to us.

To add a contact, PeerBox uses an encrypted invitation system. You create an invitation as a ZIP file protected by three words of your choice. You send the file through any channel you want. Then you pass the three words through a different channel: a text message, a phone call, in person… Your contact imports the file, enters the three words, and that’s it. This mechanism ensures that even if someone intercepts the invitation file, they can’t do anything with it without those three words.

And since only the contacts you’ve accepted can write to you, spam simply doesn’t exist in PeerBox. It’s not a spam filter. It’s not a detection algorithm. It’s the architecture itself that makes spam impossible.

How does it work under the hood?

We won’t drown you in technical jargon. How PeerBox works fits in a single sentence: your PC or smartphone sends an encrypted message straight to your contact’s PC or smartphone through the Tor network. There’s nothing in between. No relay server. No intermediate mailbox. Nothing at all. Now, for those who want to understand what’s under the hood, here are the building blocks PeerBox relies on:

SSH handles message transport. It’s the protocol that millions of system administrators have been using every single day since 1995 to securely connect to remote servers. When a bank manages its servers remotely, it uses SSH. PeerBox does the same thing for your messages.

Tor guarantees anonymity. Every PeerBox installation creates a Tor hidden service, a kind of invisible address reachable only through the Tor network. Nobody can know where your machine is physically located. Nobody can trace things back to your IP address.

GPG encrypts message content with military-grade encryption. This standard has been used since 1999 by journalists, whistleblowers and organizations around the world to protect their communications.

gocryptfs protects all your data locally. The whole PeerBox setup (messages, contacts, configuration) is locked inside an AES-256 encrypted vault on your machine. When PeerBox is closed, the vault is sealed. If your PC gets stolen, your data is unreadable. And after five failed password attempts, everything is destroyed beyond recovery.

None of these technologies are new. SSH has been around since 1995. Tor since 2002. GPG since 1999. These are tools hardened by decades of heavy use. We’re not claiming to have invented anything. We just found the right way to piece them together to create something that didn’t exist before: a messaging system that’s truly private, truly decentralized and truly usable.

Plugins open up a whole world of possibilities

The PeerBox core does one thing and does it well: send and receive messages securely. Everything else is handled through plugins.

Plugins are extensions that add functionality without touching the heart of the system. At launch, two plugins are available. Snowflake lets you contribute to the Tor network by turning your machine into an access point for users being censored in other countries. PeerBox Server makes your PeerBox reachable from any mobile device through a web browser over a secure Tor connection. More plugins are in development. And any developer can build their own thanks to the developer guide included in the PeerBox documentation.

You need to use PeerBox because privacy isn’t optional

We often hear the same old tune: “I have nothing to hide, so I don’t care.” If you think that way, it’s simply because you haven’t pictured the problem clearly enough. So let’s do a little exercise. You’re at home, chatting with a close friend. You’re getting into personal stuff. Your health. Your finances. Your political opinions. Your doubts. Your plans. Your sex life… Now imagine you turn around and see Google leaning against the wall taking notes. The NSA sitting in the armchair recording everything. A data broker at the window selling off every sentence you say to the highest bidder.

You’d get angry. Anyone would get angry. And yet that’s exactly what happens every time you send an email. You don’t see them, but all the traitors are right there.

Respect for your privacy and the confidentiality of your exchanges are not a luxury. They’re a fundamental right, written into Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It’s non-negotiable, and it shouldn’t depend on the goodwill of some Silicon Valley company.

Every single day we see companies, government agencies and individuals getting hacked because of email’s structural weakness. Medical records leaking. Confidential documents ending up in the wild. Stolen identities. All of it because we keep trusting a system that was never designed to protect anything.

“But anonymity helps criminals!”

We know the argument. We saw it coming. And we’ve got an answer! Until proven otherwise, police investigations are conducted in the field. With human intelligence. With actual investigative work. Not by hoovering up metadata in bulk from behind a screen. Mass surveillance has never stopped a single terrorist attack. What actually works is old-school investigation, and nothing else.

So using that argument to justify surveilling everyone is like banning curtains on windows because a burglar might use them to hide. There’s an apocryphal quote often attributed to Benjamin Franklin that sums up the situation perfectly: “A people willing to sacrifice a little liberty for a little safety deserve neither, and will lose both.” It probably isn’t really his, but it’s dead accurate.

What’s really at stake with privacy

Breaking trust in the tools we use to communicate is way more serious than a question of personal data. It’s breaking people’s ability to exchange freely. To confront their ideas. To develop critical thinking by discussing things without holding back.

It’s isolating individuals by leaving them with the impression that they’re the only ones thinking what they truly think. That their doubts, opinions and convictions are fringe. Because when you know someone’s listening, you start censoring yourself. You soften the edges. You steer clear of uncomfortable topics. And that’s how a society loses its ability to think freely.

Free and confidential communication is not some gadget. It’s the foundation of any functioning democracy. And PeerBox is a tool built to serve that principle.

Conclusion: it’s time to join the PeerBox adventure

PeerBox is available right now. The source code is published on Codeberg under the AGPL license. You can read it, audit it, modify it and redistribute it. It’s free software in the strictest sense of the term.

Peerbox.org

If you’re a developer

The code is clean. It’s been audited. The architecture is modular, and the plugin system lets you extend PeerBox in every direction without ever touching the core. A full developer guide is included in the documentation.

What comes next is simple: this project needs contributors to keep PeerBox growing. We need coders, translators, help with documentation, ports to other distributions… Every contribution counts.

If you’re a user

Installing PeerBox means taking back control of your communications. Every person who adopts PeerBox strengthens the network and proves that an alternative to centralized systems is possible. You don’t need any special skills. You install it. You use it. And you get back what should always have been the norm: exchanges that belong to nobody but you and the people you’re talking to.

The PeerBox community is organizing around dedicated NovaFlow spaces:

PeerBox forum: Peerbox – Development and Support

Spread the word about PeerBox. Share this article far and wide. Post your questions on the NovaFlow spaces. And if you find a bug, please report it. That’s how an open source project grows. And to wrap things up, if you appreciate what we’re doing, please take a few seconds to support us by buying us a coffee. We promise we always put it to good use. See you very soon for new adventures in the wonderful world of open source.