Northwire is a privacy and perfomance focused Misfin server that tries it's best to encrypt messages and in an event of actual breach, protect the data. All the while being fast in an attempt to serve as many people as possible with as little resource as possible. Providing Gemini a with it's own messaging infrastructure, potentially a new path to supporting 2FA and a path to new usecases.
Misfin is a messaging protocol - it delivers messages to a remote server. Anyone with a Misfin certificate can send Misfin messages.. to a Misfin server; replies too has to be sent somewhere online for them to be record and fetched later. Northwire functions as always online mailbox for the delivery and handles common but annoyning issues like automatic redelivery and managing drafts. For example alice@unstableinernet.com might only be online 7 hours a day due to networking or power cosntraints. Northwire will automatically retries delivery for several days to make the delivery happen.
Northwire doesn't lock you into using its interface exclusively. It creates a new Misfin certificate on sign up - You can download and import it into your own Misfin client in order to send messages at your own pace.
Your Misfin Certificate
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Send Directly Yourself Send via Northwire
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| Your Misfin Client| | Northwire Gemini |
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Recipient's Misfin Server
Northwire supports Misfin(B) and will attempt to use the draft Misfin(C) protocol when the message is larger then the 2048 bytes supported by Misfin(B). However, due to Misfin(C) not being widly supported. Delivery of large messages may fail. Please cehck message delivery status to confirm is Northwire is able to deliver the message.
Like SMPT/ordinary email, Misfin does not support end-to-end encryption by their nature -- Northwire as the intermidate system and technically still see the messages in their raw form, if not just to render them into Gemtext -- you'll have to use GPG for that. However, Northwire encrypts/blinds most of it's indices, data, and metadata with encryptions keys and rotate them very regularly. Using "better then military grade encryption" (joke on VPN companies if you didn't get it, Northwire runs on XChaCha20 and BLAKE2b). Leaked database would be bad but not disastrous -- the database dump quickly becomes mostly useless as the used encryption keys gets rotated into the void.
Please refer to the following link for more detailed explnation of how Northwire encrypts your messages:
Misfin is a new, lightweight messaging protocol. Misfin to SMPT is what Gemini is to HTTP - a simpler but not nessarily less capable protocol. Misfin is dramatically simpler then what if colloquially referred to as email, using Gemtext as it's markup language and client certificates for authentication.
However, Misfin is not designed to replace email and SMTP. But to create a human-scale alternative that is less distracting, respects your attention and not to be obnoxious.
And active communitis on Geminispace about Misfin
You can reach Northwire at the following (Misfin) addresses:
This page is rendered from Gemini Gemtext to HTML. We recommened to get a proper Gemini client for the best experience.