An E-Mail Based Solution for Peer to Peer File Download

Peer-to-peer networking, often referred to as P2P, is perhaps one of the most useful and yet misunderstood technologies to emerge in recent years. When people think of P2P they usually think of one thing: sharing music files, often illegally. This is because file-sharing applications such as Bit Torrent have risen in popularity at a staggering rate, and these applications use P2P technology to work.

Peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing has seen both tremendous popularity and seemingly endless controversy. For many, P2P software clients have become part of the standard suite of PC applications. With millions of users world-wide sharing music, video, software, and pictures, file movement on these networks represent a significant percentage of internet traffic Peer-to-peer file-sharing networks enable users to “publish” or “share” files – any file from music to video to spreadsheets.

An email based Peer-to-Peer file download technique will be a huge improvement over the existing P2P networks since every node would be reachable, and it would be possible to send a file to multiple users without uploading it multiple times. An E-mail address can be used to uniquely identify a particular host on the internet irrespective of the nature of his network connection. This paper presents an innovative idea of downloading files through e-mail using the concept of P2P. The data communication between the peers would occur through the process of message passing. Message passing would be done through Electronic-mail.