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I agree, email sucks. However it seems like a reasonable goal to improve it. Signal started out with SMS, which was quickly abandoned. Your target would basi

by sliken 9y ago

I agree, email sucks. However it seems like a reasonable goal to improve it. Signal started out with SMS, which was quickly abandoned. Your target would basically get a SMS message saying something like "someone is sending you an encrypted message, please install signal to read it". Seems like a imap proxy could do similar. Use a DHT to track who has a public key. Send anyone who doesn't a "please install this plugin/proxy/whatever to read this message". Have a signal like autogeneration of keys tied to an email address instead of signal's phone number. Could even have a service like <username>@whisper.com to allow people to use their favorite email client (like thunderbird) to send/receive email and leak less metadata. The imap proxy would use a signal like transport for anything matching @whisper.com. I seem to recall a project like this mentioned, even a thunderbird plugin or some such. Not as secure as signal, but better than today's default.

tptacek 9y ago
It's hard to understand why we'd spend effort pushing for adoption of a rube goldberg machine that can only hope to approach the security of Signal when we could instead just have people adopt Signal.
- sliken 9y ago
  Signal needs quite a bit of work to be as useful as email. No choice in clients, requiring a cell number, no search, and no threads. Hard to imagine someone that uses email heavily with large volume of email trying to cram that much information into signal and then be able to find it again years later.
  - tptacek 9y ago
    The vast, overwhelming majority of email users --- who also encompass the vast, overwhelming majority of users with serious privacy needs, contrary to the opinion of "privacy nerds" --- use whichever email client they were first introduced to, never change clients, and don't use any of the advanced features in those clients. Those are the users who are better served by Signal than by some janky attempt to make email almost perhaps under the best circumstances 60% as secure as Signal.

by sliken 9y ago

tptacek 9y ago

It's hard to understand why we'd spend effort pushing for adoption of a rube goldberg machine that can only hope to approach the security of Signal when we could instead just have people adopt Signal.

sliken 9y ago
Signal needs quite a bit of work to be as useful as email. No choice in clients, requiring a cell number, no search, and no threads. Hard to imagine someone that uses email heavily with large volume of email trying to cram that much information into signal and then be able to find it again years later.
- tptacek 9y ago
  The vast, overwhelming majority of email users --- who also encompass the vast, overwhelming majority of users with serious privacy needs, contrary to the opinion of "privacy nerds" --- use whichever email client they were first introduced to, never change clients, and don't use any of the advanced features in those clients. Those are the users who are better served by Signal than by some janky attempt to make email almost perhaps under the best circumstances 60% as secure as Signal.