Status: Phase 1 placeholder. Substantive content lands in Phase 5 per §8.1.

Statement

Email is @chattr.buzz-addressed mail, sent and received through a Vercel-side AWS SES dispatch + Haraka SMTP receiver, with bodies encrypted via NIP-44 and indexed via kind:30078 metadata events on the user's relays. The UI is a familiar inbox-and-folders surface, but the underlying object — an encrypted blob hash referenced by a kind:30078 event — is not the user's mental model. The UI's job is to hide that gap without lying about the seams that matter (suppression, bounce, send-failure).

Why

Email is the surface where users have the strongest pre-existing mental model — "an inbox is an inbox" — and the underlying architecture diverges most from that model. Treating email as ordinary mail produces UI that fails when the architecture pokes through: a "sent" indicator that doesn't account for the Blossom upload step, a "received" indicator that doesn't account for the Haraka inbound ingestion lag, an empty inbox that doesn't explain the MX-DNS-blocked status of the inbound path.

Email's discipline is to honour the inbox metaphor everywhere it does no damage, and to break it explicitly at the seams the user must understand: bounces (we permanently suppressed your recipient, here's why), sends without delivery (your message is encrypted and stored; SES dispatched it), and the @chattr.buzz-only constraint (you cannot send to arbitrary external addresses without the dispatch path).

How

This stub is intentionally thin. Substantive E-1 content matures in Phase 5. Expected coverage at maturity:

Inbox / sent / drafts / trash / spam folders, with the Folder tab pattern
Compose surface: rich-text via Tiptap, sanitised on send via EmailParserService (DOMPurify, 33 tags / 9 attrs)
Thread view with reply chain
Address-book autocomplete from EmailContactService (top-10 by interaction count)
Bounce / suppression error surfaces with specific failure naming (V-2 voice & tone)
The MX-blocked inbound state explained honestly until the DNS milestone lands

Phase 5 fills these in with audit citations and per-surface specifications.