Mail, without the mail server. These are TEIA's on-chain direct messages: the conversation lives on the blockchain, the text on IPFS, and your wallet is the address - there is no account to make and no inbox of ours to trust. It is the same messaging system that runs on teia.art, so anything you write here arrives there too.
Sending costs a small fee, and it goes to TEIA's non-profit treasury rather than to us - the DAO sets and collects it, and it pays for the infrastructure the community runs on.
This is a deliberately narrow view of it: one-to-one messages, and nothing else. The same contract also carries public channels, private chatrooms, admin roles and DAO moderation - to use any of that, go to teia.art, where the whole thing lives. Your conversations are the same either way.
Your messages live on the blockchain, not on our servers. Sync the wallet they were sent to and they will be read straight from the chain.
Below is a sample conversation, not anyone's: this is what the page looks like with a wallet synced.