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I love email, it's great for long letters and so. That said, I have trouble (further) adopting and especially recommending a fundamentally insecure and flawed m
by approxim8ion 5y ago
I love email, it's great for long letters and so. That said, I have trouble (further) adopting and especially recommending a fundamentally insecure and flawed medium like email in 2021 when clearly technically superior channels of communication exist. Signal, Matrix etc are not 1:1 replacements for email at all, but when it comes down to it, they are simpler and more secure.
- twobitshifter 5y agoIf you go back to the beginning of email you’ll see it was the simplest invention possible. you@domain.com was just your user account on an actual Unix computer. Mail messages were appended to a text file in a folder for each user. Somebody could get your IP address/email if they had your machine in their host file, but at that time you didn’t have to worry about spam, viruses, or eavesdropping. You didn’t even need POP or IMAP, since messages were sent directly to the machine that you had access to. This is still possible, but nobody has a static IP or hosts their own mail server.
- approxim8ion 5y agoYes. Even beyond that, my understanding is that the fundamental issues with email are that: a. It is used as the basis for setting up a lot of accounts, but there is no clear way to establish identity with an email account. b. SMTP is very dated, and the large amounts of metadata (if not the entire body of every mail as well) that goes through it is doomed to be in plaintext forever c. Encryption is far from standard, PGP is very clunky and has problems of its own, and just doesn't have adoption. It works, somewhat, but it's not really good enough.