Encrypted messaging & mail
Communication on the framework follows the same principle as the rest of it: hold as little as possible, and encrypt what you must hold. Two surfaces put that into practice — peer-to-peer messaging and mail — and neither treats your content as something to accumulate.
Zeq Message — relay, don't retain
Zeq Message is a peer-to-peer relay. A message is passed between participants rather than parked in a store the operator can read later; what persists is a transit receipt on the audit chain, not the message body. The design goal is plain: move the message, keep the proof it moved, retain the content as little as possible.
Everything about a participant that could identify them is encrypted at the field level — display name, bio, status text, nickname are all sealed, not stored in the clear. Public profile links stay opaque. So even the metadata a messaging system usually leaks is kept confidential here.
Peer-relayed
Messages are relayed between participants; the body isn't retained in a readable server store.
Receipts, not contents
What lands on the audit chain is a proof of transit — verifiable that a message moved, without keeping what it said.
Encrypted identity
Profile fields — name, bio, status, nickname — are sealed at the field level, not stored in the clear.
Zeq Mail — the chain is the record
Zeq Mail is mail built on a machine: compose, inbox, sent, contacts, aliases — with public keys for addressing and the machine's own audit chain as the record of what happened. Where a normal mail server is a database of everyone's messages, Zeq Mail leans on the framework's primitives — HITE sealing, per-machine state, provable transitions — so mail is an auditable surface on your machine rather than content pooled on someone else's.
Why this sits under security
Messaging and mail are documented here, next to HITE and ZeqID, because privacy is their defining feature. They're not communication apps that added encryption as an afterthought — they're expressions of the same doctrine: your identity is yours, your content isn't the operator's to keep, and what's provable is the fact of a thing happening, not a copy of the thing.
Read next
- HITE encryption — the sealing these surfaces build on.
- ZeqID — the identity that addresses a message or a mailbox.
- Applications — Zeq Message and Zeq Mail as live apps.