For the sake of argument, let's say that all email was hosted on ENS. Let's say that somebody, doesn't matter who, went ahead and forked the chain into ENS'. We now have two disconnected chains, ENS and ENS'. If I were to buy a domain on ENS', i would not also own the domain on ENS, so someone else buys that. Who now receives the mail sent to that domain?
If your choice in any way depends on the configuration of the mail server then your decentralized system has accomplished absolutely nothing, because the mail provider is still the gatekeeper.
That's the beauty of it - we'd have a decentralized marketplace for deciding which one counts! Every email sender can choose to use one or the other, and the best one should win in the marketplace of ideas!
> If your choice in any way depends on the configuration of the mail server then your decentralized system has accomplished absolutely nothing, because the mail provider is still the gatekeeper.
This is a strawman. If you are talking about a decentralized system, you don't need the mail provider to send the message for you. Your email application would (and should) be able to resolve the IP address of the destination server for you, and it would (and should) be able to verify that the end server is who the sender expects it to be.
So, what would happen is that if you are on ENS', your view of the network would follow the consensus established by the ENS' chain. If you try to send a message to an email server that is on ENS, they would fail to provide a valid confirmation that they can respond for the IP address that you think they are on. It would be akin to failing a DNSSEC query.
If your choice in any way depends on the configuration of the mail server then your decentralized system has accomplished absolutely nothing, because the mail provider is still the gatekeeper.