3 ms·

> I recommend everyone BUY A DOMAIN. you will end up having most of your conversations with gmail or outlook users so that would not change anything

by polote 6y ago

vkou 6y ago
This is the only correct response to this problem, and it needs to be seen more prominently. E-mail in 2020 is not secure against a motivated attacker. It doesn't matter how secure and woke your provider is, when: 1. Everyone you talk on an e-mail thread gets a copy of the entire e-mail thread, to do whatever they want with. 2. You can't control the present and future security of other people's providers, or the present and future security of the computing devices they use to read the e-mail you send them. Now, if you want to LARP, you can try setting up a mailing list for your friends who only use secure providers (For whatever definition of secure you want to use), and only limit your use of a single e-mail address to that mailing list. Great. Go for it. Write a blog post about it, even. But that's not going to solve the fundamental problems of #1 and #2 for the rest of the world. Now, if you actually want security (as opposed to 'I want to LARP at security'), take a page from conspiracies in the financial sector, and don't use e-mail for any conversations that you'd like to remain secure. Securing e-mail is a waste of time. It can't be secured, because of 50 years of social expectations about how e-mail should behave. (Other people retain copies of your e-mails, and other people can choose which provider services their address.) You can spend that effort on trying to secure a different communication protocol, which does not have those 50 years of social expectations, and that will probably lose to e-mail (Because those two security holes provide users with value, and when it comes to value versus security, security will lose every time.)

> I recommend everyone BUY A DOMAIN. you will end up having most of your conversations with gmail or outlook users so that would not change anything

by polote 6y ago

> I recommend everyone BUY A DOMAIN. you will end up having most of your conversations with gmail or outlook users so that would not change anything

vkou 6y ago

This is the only correct response to this problem, and it needs to be seen more prominently. E-mail in 2020 is not secure against a motivated attacker. It doesn't matter how secure and woke your provider is, when: 1. Everyone you talk on an e-mail thread gets a copy of the entire e-mail thread, to do whatever they want with. 2. You can't control the present and future security of other people's providers, or the present and future security of the computing devices they use to read the e-mail you send them. Now, if you want to LARP, you can try setting up a mailing list for your friends who only use secure providers (For whatever definition of secure you want to use), and only limit your use of a single e-mail address to that mailing list. Great. Go for it. Write a blog post about it, even. But that's not going to solve the fundamental problems of #1 and #2 for the rest of the world. Now, if you actually want security (as opposed to 'I want to LARP at security'), take a page from conspiracies in the financial sector, and don't use e-mail for any conversations that you'd like to remain secure. Securing e-mail is a waste of time. It can't be secured, because of 50 years of social expectations about how e-mail should behave. (Other people retain copies of your e-mails, and other people can choose which provider services their address.) You can spend that effort on trying to secure a different communication protocol, which does not have those 50 years of social expectations, and that will probably lose to e-mail (Because those two security holes provide users with value, and when it comes to value versus security, security will lose every time.)