16 ms·

Re-thinking electronic mail

123 points by pcr910303 5y ago

usrbinbash 5y ago
> Receiving Email from strangers Lets walk through the proposed solutions to this issue, because this is the biggest problem I see with the proposed new way of mailing: > In the simplest case, the server might never give out stamps For me, that's not feasible. I hand out my mail addr. with cards, as signature, its on websites, in READMEs, etc. I knowingly invite people to contact me via mail. > The server might require the putative sender to solve a CAPTCHA of some kind. How does that work if the mail is generated automatically, eg. a coworker makes me the recipient of a customers monitoring system? How does this work if the mail is generated without a GUI, eg. using a terminal mail-client? > The server might require the sender to write a short sentence of why they want to reach the recipient. If that contains keywords chosen by the recipient, the server issues the stamp. How does this solve the problem of being able to be contacted by strangers? The would-be sender has to know the keywords. If these are publicly available, eg. in a README, then there is no security, if they are not, sending a mail becomes guesswork for the sender. > The server might require some sort of proof of work. Let's forget for a moment how much trouble is caused by the energy consumption of cryptocurrencies, but how would that work on, say, a mobile device with already limited battery power? > The server could require a very small payment. The article points out the problem with this already. This would mean companies that can afford the fees are now free to spam me with advertising, but someone from an underprivileged community, who found a bug in my project, may think twice about contacting me. ----- Edit: In my opinion, spam and phishing are not problems that should be solved by changing or replacing SMTP. Don't get me wrong, I am not defending SMTP. It has a lot of shortcomings that need to be addressed, the biggest are an incabability to transmit binary data without resorting to base64 encoding, and the lack of built-in encryption support. But spam and phising are issues to be solved at the application level, not the protocol level. Spam isn't that different from portscans, and we don't change TCP/IP to prevent these.
- emacsen 5y ago
  > The server might require some sort of proof of work. One of the things that I think many people don't really understand about the proposal I made for Stamps is that POW is not required for stamps. Stamps can be given in any number of ways. For example, someone could simply issue them, with money. For example, if Alice wants to contact Bob for the first time, Bob might say "It will cost one Stamp please", and then Alice will need to get a stamp, maybe it costs 25 cents. Then Alice gives the stamp to Bob, and Bob lets the message pass. I think proof-of-work systems are incredibly wasteful, and would think that should be an absolute last resort.
  - usrbinbash 5y ago
    Pay-For-Stamps is also not an option in most use-cases where I want strangers to contact me. Say a purchase representative wants to contact another company with inquiries about purchasing options for their product. To draw a clumsy analogy: Imagine a supermarket charging an entrance fee. How many customers would they have?
    - emacsen 5y ago
      > Imagine a supermarket charging an entrance fee. 90% of European supermarkets (and some Canadian supermarkets) require you to put money in them to unlock them. It's either 1 euro or 1 Canadian dollar. You get your money back when you give the cart back. > How many customers would they have? shrug
      - usrbinbash 5y ago
        That's not an etrance fee, the coin is used as a token to get a shopping cart.
- pixl97 5y ago
  >Spam isn't that different from portscans, and we don't change TCP/IP to prevent these. Guess you've not heard of port knocking.
  - usrbinbash 5y ago
    Portknocking is not part of TCP. It's implemented at the application layer via a daemon listening for knocks and opening the firewall on demand.
tony-allan 5y ago
I like many of the idea's but the real work is thinking how you would use this in practice. For example take some typical scenarios and imaging how they would work in this post-SMTP world. (1) I'm talking to someone on the phone and I want to give them my "email address". What would this look like? (2) I sell canned soup in a store and want to put something on the can. What would this look like? (possible a QR code with an identity and a stamp?) (3) How would you go setting up a "mail list" for a club with minimal friction, especially if everyone doesn't have their phone with them.
- upofadown 5y ago
  The identity here would be based on cryptographic signatures so it would look ultimately have to look like some sort of key fingerprint. For example, an OpenPGP identity contains one or more email addresses. So the fingerprint is all you need to give anyone. In practice this can be provided in the form of a QR code. There is even a standard way to do this. A secure mail list running on a server has to reencrypt the message to each recipent (it has access to the messages). So you would give the mail list server something like a key fingerprint. The original signatures would ideally survive the trip through the server.
stewbrew 5y ago
Wouldn't an SMTP that requires authentication and non forgeable sender addresses solve 90% of the problem of spam etc.
- cube00 5y ago
  That's what we have now, SMTP open relays are not the out of the box configuration. The problem is who owns that SMTP server. If I self host then the big providers don't want to know me. Google goes straight to spam regardless of SPF/DKIM and Microsoft flat out 550 refuses to even accept a connection. A local ISP also pre-banned me because of DigitalOcean's past lax approach to stamping out spammers on their droplets.
peppermint_tea 5y ago
The solutions are already there... there is a lack of will from the corporations to implement them. google checking gpg signature? nope. The internet is unfortunately not user-centric enough, there is much more value in sending crap html emails "only 10 hours left 50% discount" and scanning your emails than there is to provide users with secure communications. let's all sign our emails to raise awareness of google's & outlook shortcoming P.S : we tend not to sign our emails since it is not the standard, standard is de-facto dictated by google and outlook now. P.P.S : seeing an unsigned email would raise suspicion if the standard was the opposite, a filter could even classify between signed and unsigned P.P.P.S : you would only bother to verify the identity for the emails you care for P.P.P.P.S : if you think google does not dictate the standards, feel free to point to me the part of the rfc that mention that residential ips are not valid.
- sbuk 5y ago
  Google and Gmail account for a very small amount of the global mail-flow and have even less of an impact on standards. In fact they only appear as a contributor/author on RFC8617 (ARC). No standard says, or even suggest, that “residential ips are not valid.” However, reputation is an important par of mail security. Most, if not all residential IPs won’t be sending enough mail to even register a reputation (look up your own on https://talosintelligence.com/ https://talosintelligence.com/). This is the main challenge for self-hosters. That and a significant majority of residential ISPs block SMTP traffic, for very obvious reasons. This isn’t some Google/Microsoft conspiracy. SMTP is fundamentally a plain text format that has been abused for the last 30 or so years - 30, because that’s when MIME became a thing.
  - 3825 5y ago
    Thank you for the link. I checked my duckdns.org subdomain and found that I am on a blocklist and my reputation is poor. I don’t even run SMTP. Comcast Xfinity, if that matters. Fwd/Rev DNS Match Yes Last Day Vol. 0.0 Last Month Vol. 0.0 Block Lists 1 BLOCKED IN: pbl.spamhaus.org Email Rep. Poor
    - 5y ago
senko 5y ago
Interesting article. I think the reasoning about multiple identities and adresses is spot on, as is the use of signature and stamps to limit spam. I do think, however, that use case of receiving mail from strangers is a much bigger case and can't be handwaved away. I was thinking of something similar lately, coming at it from the social networks angle. I was thinking about personas in social network setting (what google+ attempted with circles), ownership of your data and social links, and the thought process led me to something very similar to what OP is describing.
emacsen 5y ago
Since I'm explicitly mentioned in the article, let me say a few things: a) I agree email is forked up. b) I think a stamps-like solution could possibly work, but it's not the email part that makes it hard, it's the ecosystem around email that makes it hard. For example, once you send an attenuated capability to someone else, you've lost it, which means your system needs to be aware that what you're sending is a capability token and not an identity token. If what I've said doesn't make sense- I'll explain a bit later on in this post. c) I think it's nice to think creatively about message systems, including email, XMPP, ActivityPub Now I'll say where I see the problems here being: 1. Overlaying on top of email The problem with a protocol such as email is once it's in place, it's in place. Stamps (which is the idea the author references) could maybe be overlayed on ActivityPub- but I worry the time for that ship is either closing or it's sailed. I have many more thoughts on this point but it would be pages of thinking, so I'll leave it at that. 2. Cryptography not required The author wants public keys, emails signed, etc. You don't need any of that for this to work. What I proposed for AP (and still do) is that we can have a "public" address and then private, revocable addresses. You can then combine that with a bearer token exchange system. It's actually very simple, though I'm oversimplifying it too much here. 3. The author says I got it from Christine Webber, and "who knows where she got it from"- She got it from Mark Miller's Ph.D thesis, as well as the work done by Chip Morningstar. The theory behind all of this is called Object-capability Theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-capability_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-capability_model) The email addresses are what the OCAP folks would call a capability token- the ability to send an email is a capability, and the special email I give someone is a capability token, a bearer token in this case (though there are other patterns in the OCAP world). I can then make other attenuated capabilities, ie proxy capabilities that may act slightly different or serve a specific purpose- like a share link that only works for a week, or a share link that's upload only, etc. Why is all this important? Because understanding the theory will help you understand the possibilities, and also the possible flaws. Am happy to discuss further.
- senko 5y ago
  Capabilities don't solve double spending(or in this case, double sending) token, as they are intentionally transferrable. So you'd need to have a way to bind a capability to a sender, which naturally leads to PK, or treat them as short lived tokens you revoke as soon as you see they've leaked, which is identical to throwaway email addresses we already have.
dotancohen 5y ago
In my opinion, most of the problems with today's email systems could be solved if the recipient system would require an ε payment to the recipients' public wallet. I don't care what the value of ε is nor in which digital coin it is. But there should be a negligible cost to send email, and a benefit to the receiver. I would even go further and alot email priorities, each high priority requiring a higher payment. So my bank notifying me of an attempted login might pay a little more, but that message goes to the top of my heap. Whereas aunt sally's digital birthday card cost her near nothing and I'll get to it when I'm done with all the attempted logins to my bank. The best part of this system is that it really does not require actual money to be exchanged. If one prefers, he could just mine the coins he uses to send the mail with. That's a feature, not a bug, to keep the system inclusive for all low-volume senders but far less so for spammers. It also makes scamming far less lucrative.
- teddyh 5y ago
  Please read https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt and check all boxes that apply to your post yourself. Ideas such as yours have been around since the mid-1990’s and have been debated to death since then, so much so that the aforementioned template was created.
  - tomjen3 5y ago
    That template essentially shot down any discussion of fixing email in the open source space, and so companies like Slack, Google and MSFT were able to create walled gardens that can only be interacted with by their systems or by email senders they consider secure enough. If, instead of creating that template, somebody had made Thunderbird send PoW headers and priotize those that had it, maybe we would have been in a freer world.
    - teddyh 5y ago
      And yet, nobody who could have made that change in Thunderbird thought it would be a good idea to do that. This is how ideas are evaluated and either adopted or rejected.
regnull 5y ago
I was working on something quite similar for the last year. It’s an email system based on digital identities, where every piece of outgoing mail is encrypted and signed. It works with the existing email infrastructure by having a gateway which does encryption for the incoming mail and decrypts the outgoing mail. There is also a IMAP/SMTP bridge to allow any existing email client to work with the system. Eventually the identity registry will be decentralized, choosing the right blockchain is the tricky part. https://ubikom.cc https://ubikom.cc
smallbizdev420 5y ago
I would like some feedback on a possible solution to one of the problems: Spam. And my proposed solution is blockchain. Hear me out :-) What if sending a mail required a proof of work (the digital equivalent of a stamp)? Then sending mail in bulk would be costly enough to lessen the spate of spam. Unstamped mail would be spam unless the recipient agreed to accept it without the stamp. Legal bulk mail senders could obtain stamps in bulk providing they agree to abide by the rules (no tracking, easy unsubscribe etc.) and provide proof of doing so. By allowing unstamped mail to be delivered, yet be contingent on the receipients choice, I think we can deal with older clients that can't be updated, noble causes etc. Feedback welcome.
- smusamashah 5y ago
  This is already proposed in the article. You probably haven't read it or may be I misunderstood what author meant by requiring proof of work to avoid spam.
- zajio1am 5y ago
  Does not work against spambot networks on hacked computers.
  - smallbizdev420 5y ago
    Doesn't it, though? Wouldn't it mean you'd need more hacked computing resources for sending the same amount of mail?
    - throwaway984393 5y ago
      It's an economics problem then. They'd send less spam but they'd be paid more for each mail sent.
- tyingq 5y ago
  Mentioned in another comment here, but you're describing hashcash: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash
jqpabc123 5y ago
The main problem with email is simple lack of privacy in my opinion. Privacy is the primary attraction of instant messaging. End to end encryption is OK but most users don't really need it and it tends to complicate operations. Fixing the privacy issue doesn't require any changes to protocol or email clients. The solution is really just a configurable email forwarding service. Every user should have both a public email address used for sending and a private email address used for receiving. The mail server automatically replaces the private address with the public address on all outgoing mail. Received mail gets forwarded from public to private only if it meets certain rules setup on the mail server. Otherwise, the address is rejected as unknown. A simple rule set would be a list of allowed addresses. If an address is not on the list, it gets rejected. Addresses are automatically added to the allow list by sending an outbound message to the recipient's address OR by sending a coded message to the mail server. Likewise, an address can be deleted from the list by sending a coded message to the mail server. If you actually want email from anyone, don't apply any rules. What does a "coded message" look like? How about one addressed to the target but with an empty body and either "!ADD" or "!DEL" as the subject? I have considered building this myself on occasion but all the reputation machinations currently in place that attempt but largely fail to address the spam problem act as a deterrent.
- cogman10 5y ago
  I'd call spam one of the biggest problems with email. To solve it, I'd say a protocol extension is needed. In the ideal case, you could have a certificate authority and everyone's email gets signed. Spam and get your cert revoked globally. That would be hard to pull off though.
  - dboreham 5y ago
    This has been tried (several times). Email server operators are too lazy to configure it. Spammers subvert the servers that do have it configured.
  - jqpabc123 5y ago
    Spam is the lack of privacy I was referring to. To solve it, I'd say a protocol extension is needed. Or maybe a protocol reduction. The relay system is the source of lots of evil and was really designed for a bygone era. Eliminate "open" relays --- only accept email directly from the source server --- and most spam goes away with a simple privacy filter as I described above. It is easy to "spoof" an address, much harder to "spoof" a server.
upofadown 5y ago
I totally agree that email, and messaging in general, would be much better if we solved the identity issue. I don't agree that there is anything particularly broken about the two existing standards to do this. The last thing we need is another standard for signing email. The root problem is that we treat anonymous email (unsigned) the same as email from people we know (signed by such a person). Treating anonymous email with normal suspicion pretty much solves the problems with email ... as pointed out in the article. I think there is a tendency to want to solve a technical problem, even when no such problem exists. This will ultimately have to be solved at the people level.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- kwhitefoot 5y ago
  > Treating anonymous email with normal suspicion pretty much solves the problems with email I have a rule in Thunderbird that directs all email from senders not in my contacts list to a separate folder instead of the inbox.
Rochus 5y ago
Isn't there already a viable technical solution in use for all listed issues? E.g. spam/scam can be avoided by SPF (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sender_Policy_Framework https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sender_Policy_Framework), identity verification and encpryption is solved by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S/MIME https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S/MIME.
- kajiryoji 5y ago
  For one, S/MIME certificates all require a non-trivial amount of yearly price.
  - Rochus 5y ago
    I use a free self-signed one just for the purpose of encryption. But there are also providers where you can get identity verifiably certificates for free.
- sbuk 5y ago
  You'd be surprised at how many sending domains do not have SPF configured correctly. When you look at DKIM and DMARC, it get worse...
- bsdubernerd 5y ago
  I think the article misses the mark. The #1 problem is spam, but spam is mostly a social issue, not a technical one. Case in point: 90%+ of my spam is currently delivered by google. Either using fake accounts and/or hacked ones. That spam passes _all_ the technical solutions we have put in place today: SPF/DKIM/DMARC. Sure, the SMTP protocol isn't that great in today's light, but you think changing the protocol would solve it? Say hello to whatsapp spam, facebook's messenger spam, and so on...
  - Rochus 5y ago
    My spam filter works very reliably for all such cases; my first and only manual rule I had to add recently was to stop "bitcoin" spam delivered by Jira accounts; and I also check the filtered messages from time to time. I think there will be spam with any protocol we might get in future.
edward 5y ago
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22847092 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22847092
rendx 5y ago
DeltaChat has an interesting approach to extending email and open standards towards something that feels like "instant messaging", but incorporates a lot of cool features: Bots, multiparty chats, games, e2ee, p2p mode etc: https://delta.chat/ https://delta.chat/
danrl 5y ago
Today’s mail servers often don’t know who’s in the receiver’s address book or who they have received mail from before. That seems to be an untapped source for scoring on the server site. If the SMTP server also hosts the mailbox, and can access well known folders (Archive, All Mail, Junk) it could quickly decide after the RCPT TO how to react. Options: Slowing down to increase sender’s cost, requiring proof of work (hashcash style SMTP extension), adding scoring information for spam filters, issue a temporary unavailable (gray listing), you name it. Some have contact lists and email from the same provider and synced to the cloud (e.g. gmail/gcontacts; e.g. iCloud+ email hosting and icloud sync for contacts). One would expect these data sources work together, but it seems that today at best one informs the spam filter of the other, and not necessarily server side. There is potential in moving the smartness to earlier stages of the transmission where the sender is also bearing some of the costs. JMAP (sic!) is a good step to standardize syncing here. Still think there is untapped potential even there.
- jcranmer 5y ago
  > Today’s mail servers often don’t know who’s in the receiver’s address book or who they have received mail from before. One of the big revolutions in antispam was reputation-based, which is used in all large email providers. Effectively, every email domain gets a reputation based on their email history. Someone like @gmail.com that sends a lot of mail to the server that isn't spam is going to get through easily. Someone like @spammymcspamface.com that sends naught but spam is going to get black holed. Someone like @whoami.com who hasn't sent anything is going to get throttled until they can establish a reputation as not-spammy.
  - danrl 5y ago
    Reputation is, however, not weighted by data tied to the individual receiver's mailbox. Reputation is often tied to the sending domain. Reputation, as helpful as it is, doesn't tap into the data that currently remains largely untapped.
throwaway984393 5y ago
To solve 'strangers can send me email' you don't need any fancy crypto. Randomly generated long aliases work great, as they can forward to your address with an "alias[.+]" prefix or "[.+]alias" postfix, and you can kill the aliases that receive spam. Killing an alias should send all such mail to spam, or result in a bounce back. If we can push that functionality into the MTA / MDA (along with a general spam button) the mail servers can learn and respond to spam that happens across all their user accounts and either start to deliver mail into Spam folders or push back on mail deliveries with either a delay or bounce. I am concerned that charging even a penny per email would make it harder for people in developing nations to send mail (you need to understand how insanely poor some people are), and those are the countries that spammers might take advantage of. We should be very careful in today's world not to make technology that negatively affects the most vulnerable.
- twobitshifter 5y ago
  Isn’t it trivial to remove the alias from the address?
  - throwaway984393 5y ago
    Actually I meant you make the "public" e-mail address totally random, like "ksdjfksjlfdjasljhflsk@whatever.com". That address then forwards to "yourname+ksdjfksjlfdjasljhflsk@whatever.com". Then both your client and mail server will know both the "public" part of the address, and who it's supposed to really be delivered to. This enables spam filtering on a specific alias, or killing a specific alias. Additional support would need to be added to handle these features, and also automatically translating replies from your mail client so the From: address continues to be hidden. This idea mostly already exists in proprietary e-mail relays like Craigslist email addresses, but it would be nice if it were a standard.
lmilcin 5y ago
On the other hand, as much as I dislike Google, I use Google to filter spam on my email on my own domain and it seems to be extremely effective at that particular job. Over past 6 or 7 years I have been using Google I remember only one case when valid mail was classified as spam. I receive about 10-20 spam a day and I get about one spam into my inbox per month. In the past I would use catch all on my domain and give addresses like adobe.com@<my-domain> to companies. It led to some fun stories like when I started getting a lot of spam to adobe.com@<my-domain> and Adobe support (I have been paying customer -- no more) claiming that they have absolutely not lost any of my information even though I could positively verify my adobe.com@<my-domain> address and password was available in one of publicly available databases. Nowadays I am using more and more SSO + MFA and it kind of makes that pattern less useful.
- maw 5y ago
  Of the 100 most recent emails I have marked as spam in gmail, 26 were misclassified. FWIW, just an anecdatum and probably a real outlier and all that.
posix86 5y ago
What we need is a trustless trust infrastructure on which identities can be verified by anyone. Governments around the globe can verify their citizen's and companies identities as well as each others, until we have a decentralized network of trust that includes all people and relevant corporal and organisational entities. Emails are signed by all of these entities, and people choose which emails they'd like to consider through choosing trust providers, a role that'd be taken by governments or other organisations. Hence we get a distinction of emails generated by people and corporate accounts; and corporate accounts can be blocked until their communication behavior is determined acceptable. Communication challenges between corps and people suddenly are worth being treated right because they can be closed any second. Communication channels between pairs of entities _exist_, that's the first innovation actually.
- pixl97 5y ago
  > a role that'd be taken by governments or other organisations It sounds like it would be in governments best interest to control this, so they can inject their own fake identities, much like they do with spies now. Also, how does one revoke ones identity if one loses control of it. I mean, identity theft is common currently?
barbarbar 5y ago
There seems to be less spam for SMS. At least I does not seem to be a problem? So maybe the idea of a small fee for the sender is not bad?
- GeneralMaximus 5y ago
  This is not true in India, at least. There is so much SMS spam here that everyone defaults to WhatsApp for any kind of actual communication with a human. SMS is reserved for bank OTPs, 2FA, and and and endless deluge of marketing messages.
- fncypants 5y ago
  SMS spam is exploding for some.[1] A good 25% of my messages are from an address like 1a02341234e7@uyah23f.com. [1] https://www.dallasnews.com/business/technology/2021/09/28/dont-click-that-link-the-plague-of-text-message-spam-is-getting-worse-especially-for-texans/ https://www.dallasnews.com/business/technology/2021/09/28/do...
  - barbarbar 5y ago
    Oh - I had no idea. Since I have not even got one.
yholio 5y ago
This is a low effort proposal and the author seems blissfully unaware of the long and varied history of proposed alternatives to email. Alternate proposals have failed and will always fail due to the ingrained nature of email. Nobody is going to use a new email system that allows communication to zero or very few recipients, and the system can never bootstrap. And that's that, no alternative to email will succeed if its only claim to fame is that is "email done right", that's a much too weak feature to break SMTP's decades of first mover advantage. To break this clinch, you need to either: 1. deliver a communication product that has much superior features, and incidentally does mail very very well; people will start to use it for the other features, play with its email subset functionally, and in many, many, many years, the email will wither and die. Up to now, despite many claims to the contrary, no one managed to do that. The average lifespan of instant messaging protocols is around two decades (anyone on ICQ or Yahoo anymore?), while email is going strong into its 50s. 2. backport those advanced features into SMTP so that they are interoperable with the existing infrastructure AND, at the same time, deliver a tangible benefit to the people using those features, AND deliver those benefits today, not into some distant future where most people start to use it (PGP, where are you). This is a very hard set of conditions and very few technologies have managed to fulfill them, as a consequence email has evolved very slowly. So if you don't want to have the old "canned letter response making fun of your antispam system" rubbed in your face, you better start working on number 1. or number 2.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  Features can be added as long as they are backwards compatible, by adding another tag for it. For example, the tag could be your public encryption key. Then, your email app, whenever it receives a public key from a sender, the app now knows their public key and can send them encrypted messages. Those without the public key, get the plaintext email. This can all happen completely without any action on the part of the user. Over time, it will gradually become ubiquitous, like https did.
  - akerl_ 5y ago
    Attempting to bolt public key onto encryption is one of the many things that’s already been attempted multiple times. We can see from those attempts that it’s not worked, for a variety of reasons.
throwawayboise 5y ago
Email is fine. It's simple, it maps very well to peoples' intuitive real-world understanding of "mail" and it works. I've had the same email address for decades. I get some spam, but I don't drown in it. I get more spam in the real (postal) mail, if you measure by the ratio of spam mail to legitmate mail. And I get real mail that is spam but looks legitimate on first inspection. It's generally very easy to identify spam email, and delete it. I can almost always do this by the sender and subject line alone, without opening the message. It takes less time to do this than it does to periodically peruse your spam folder for false postives. Encryption/digital signatures that rely on any kind of PKI architecture won't work, because most people don't understand it or won't trust it or both. What might work is ssh-like "trust on first contact." You get a signed email from a friend. You get a little notice "you haven't seen this signature before, do you want to trust it." You can turn it off if you don't want to bother with this, and you need to be able to easily revoke the trust if you make a mistake (so even this is getting complicated). The keys need to be generated with no more complexity than "ssh-keygen" (and I work with many people, college-educated, who can't manage even that). I'm in tech, I do it for a living. I don't sign my email, and I don't verify signatures on the signed email I get. If I don't think it's worth the bother, my mom certainly won't.
- notriddle 5y ago
  > I get some spam, but I don't drown in it. I get more spam in the real (postal) mail, if you measure by the ratio of spam mail to legitmate mail. And all it cost was IP reputation systems that undermine email’s claim to be decentralized, language heuristics that undermine its claim to be reliable, and greylisting that undermine its claim to be fast.
  - insulanus 5y ago
    Don't forget the centralization that undermines its ability to be private!
- rakoo 5y ago
  > What might work is ssh-like "trust on first contact." Deltachat is working like that and I can't wait for the day everyone switches to an alternative client that behaves like it is from this century, like deltachat, instead of the last one. Who actually needs the following ? - open a different window (ie a different context) than the one you're currently in - a greetings line - quoting the entire mail you're replying to - the choice of whether you include an attachment inline or as a real attachment - threads that you can't have a glance at because messages are in different mailboxes (inbox, archive, Sent, ...) - having to click on each message to read the conversation instead of having it all in one view that you can just scroll (thanks Gmail for doing this correctly) - a custom signature no one really reads Email's basis works, but we still use it like we wrote snail mail. No one writes snail mail anymore. It's time we use it in a more modern manner.
blamestross 5y ago
Everything here assumes the existence of some sort of method to associate a random string with an identity and enough data about that identity to find a server to talk to, without having an initial server to talk to...
charles_f 5y ago
Pgp and such could solve a lot of this, if only Gmail were to implement it. But if they did, they would in a proprietary and non interoperable way, because everyone is building their own little castle rather than the highways between nowadays, and if you want to communicate "securely" with your neighbour, you'll have to install a 7th chat app on your phone

123 points by pcr910303 5y ago

> Receiving Email from strangers Lets walk through the proposed solutions to this issue, because this is the biggest problem I see with the proposed new way of mailing: > In the simplest case, the server might never give out stamps For me, that's not feasible. I hand out my mail addr. with cards, as signature, its on websites, in READMEs, etc. I knowingly invite people to contact me via mail. > The server might require the putative sender to solve a CAPTCHA of some kind. How does that work if the mail is generated automatically, eg. a coworker makes me the recipient of a customers monitoring system? How does this work if the mail is generated without a GUI, eg. using a terminal mail-client? > The server might require the sender to write a short sentence of why they want to reach the recipient. If that contains keywords chosen by the recipient, the server issues the stamp. How does this solve the problem of being able to be contacted by strangers? The would-be sender has to know the keywords. If these are publicly available, eg. in a README, then there is no security, if they are not, sending a mail becomes guesswork for the sender. > The server might require some sort of proof of work. Let's forget for a moment how much trouble is caused by the energy consumption of cryptocurrencies, but how would that work on, say, a mobile device with already limited battery power? > The server could require a very small payment. The article points out the problem with this already. This would mean companies that can afford the fees are now free to spam me with advertising, but someone from an underprivileged community, who found a bug in my project, may think twice about contacting me. ----- Edit: In my opinion, spam and phishing are not problems that should be solved by changing or replacing SMTP. Don't get me wrong, I am not defending SMTP. It has a lot of shortcomings that need to be addressed, the biggest are an incabability to transmit binary data without resorting to base64 encoding, and the lack of built-in encryption support. But spam and phising are issues to be solved at the application level, not the protocol level. Spam isn't that different from portscans, and we don't change TCP/IP to prevent these.

emacsen 5y ago
> The server might require some sort of proof of work. One of the things that I think many people don't really understand about the proposal I made for Stamps is that POW is not required for stamps. Stamps can be given in any number of ways. For example, someone could simply issue them, with money. For example, if Alice wants to contact Bob for the first time, Bob might say "It will cost one Stamp please", and then Alice will need to get a stamp, maybe it costs 25 cents. Then Alice gives the stamp to Bob, and Bob lets the message pass. I think proof-of-work systems are incredibly wasteful, and would think that should be an absolute last resort.
- usrbinbash 5y ago
  Pay-For-Stamps is also not an option in most use-cases where I want strangers to contact me. Say a purchase representative wants to contact another company with inquiries about purchasing options for their product. To draw a clumsy analogy: Imagine a supermarket charging an entrance fee. How many customers would they have?
  - emacsen 5y ago
    > Imagine a supermarket charging an entrance fee. 90% of European supermarkets (and some Canadian supermarkets) require you to put money in them to unlock them. It's either 1 euro or 1 Canadian dollar. You get your money back when you give the cart back. > How many customers would they have? shrug
    - usrbinbash 5y ago
      That's not an etrance fee, the coin is used as a token to get a shopping cart.
pixl97 5y ago
>Spam isn't that different from portscans, and we don't change TCP/IP to prevent these. Guess you've not heard of port knocking.
- usrbinbash 5y ago
  Portknocking is not part of TCP. It's implemented at the application layer via a daemon listening for knocks and opening the firewall on demand.

tony-allan 5y ago

I like many of the idea's but the real work is thinking how you would use this in practice. For example take some typical scenarios and imaging how they would work in this post-SMTP world. (1) I'm talking to someone on the phone and I want to give them my "email address". What would this look like? (2) I sell canned soup in a store and want to put something on the can. What would this look like? (possible a QR code with an identity and a stamp?) (3) How would you go setting up a "mail list" for a club with minimal friction, especially if everyone doesn't have their phone with them.

upofadown 5y ago
The identity here would be based on cryptographic signatures so it would look ultimately have to look like some sort of key fingerprint. For example, an OpenPGP identity contains one or more email addresses. So the fingerprint is all you need to give anyone. In practice this can be provided in the form of a QR code. There is even a standard way to do this. A secure mail list running on a server has to reencrypt the message to each recipent (it has access to the messages). So you would give the mail list server something like a key fingerprint. The original signatures would ideally survive the trip through the server.

stewbrew 5y ago

Wouldn't an SMTP that requires authentication and non forgeable sender addresses solve 90% of the problem of spam etc.

cube00 5y ago
That's what we have now, SMTP open relays are not the out of the box configuration. The problem is who owns that SMTP server. If I self host then the big providers don't want to know me. Google goes straight to spam regardless of SPF/DKIM and Microsoft flat out 550 refuses to even accept a connection. A local ISP also pre-banned me because of DigitalOcean's past lax approach to stamping out spammers on their droplets.

peppermint_tea 5y ago

The solutions are already there... there is a lack of will from the corporations to implement them. google checking gpg signature? nope. The internet is unfortunately not user-centric enough, there is much more value in sending crap html emails "only 10 hours left 50% discount" and scanning your emails than there is to provide users with secure communications. let's all sign our emails to raise awareness of google's & outlook shortcoming P.S : we tend not to sign our emails since it is not the standard, standard is de-facto dictated by google and outlook now. P.P.S : seeing an unsigned email would raise suspicion if the standard was the opposite, a filter could even classify between signed and unsigned P.P.P.S : you would only bother to verify the identity for the emails you care for P.P.P.P.S : if you think google does not dictate the standards, feel free to point to me the part of the rfc that mention that residential ips are not valid.

sbuk 5y ago
Google and Gmail account for a very small amount of the global mail-flow and have even less of an impact on standards. In fact they only appear as a contributor/author on RFC8617 (ARC). No standard says, or even suggest, that “residential ips are not valid.” However, reputation is an important par of mail security. Most, if not all residential IPs won’t be sending enough mail to even register a reputation (look up your own on https://talosintelligence.com/ https://talosintelligence.com/). This is the main challenge for self-hosters. That and a significant majority of residential ISPs block SMTP traffic, for very obvious reasons. This isn’t some Google/Microsoft conspiracy. SMTP is fundamentally a plain text format that has been abused for the last 30 or so years - 30, because that’s when MIME became a thing.
- 3825 5y ago
  Thank you for the link. I checked my duckdns.org subdomain and found that I am on a blocklist and my reputation is poor. I don’t even run SMTP. Comcast Xfinity, if that matters. Fwd/Rev DNS Match Yes Last Day Vol. 0.0 Last Month Vol. 0.0 Block Lists 1 BLOCKED IN: pbl.spamhaus.org Email Rep. Poor
  - 5y ago

senko 5y ago

Interesting article. I think the reasoning about multiple identities and adresses is spot on, as is the use of signature and stamps to limit spam. I do think, however, that use case of receiving mail from strangers is a much bigger case and can't be handwaved away. I was thinking of something similar lately, coming at it from the social networks angle. I was thinking about personas in social network setting (what google+ attempted with circles), ownership of your data and social links, and the thought process led me to something very similar to what OP is describing.

emacsen 5y ago

Since I'm explicitly mentioned in the article, let me say a few things: a) I agree email is forked up. b) I think a stamps-like solution could possibly work, but it's not the email part that makes it hard, it's the ecosystem around email that makes it hard. For example, once you send an attenuated capability to someone else, you've lost it, which means your system needs to be aware that what you're sending is a capability token and not an identity token. If what I've said doesn't make sense- I'll explain a bit later on in this post. c) I think it's nice to think creatively about message systems, including email, XMPP, ActivityPub Now I'll say where I see the problems here being: 1. Overlaying on top of email The problem with a protocol such as email is once it's in place, it's in place. Stamps (which is the idea the author references) could maybe be overlayed on ActivityPub- but I worry the time for that ship is either closing or it's sailed. I have many more thoughts on this point but it would be pages of thinking, so I'll leave it at that. 2. Cryptography not required The author wants public keys, emails signed, etc. You don't need any of that for this to work. What I proposed for AP (and still do) is that we can have a "public" address and then private, revocable addresses. You can then combine that with a bearer token exchange system. It's actually very simple, though I'm oversimplifying it too much here. 3. The author says I got it from Christine Webber, and "who knows where she got it from"- She got it from Mark Miller's Ph.D thesis, as well as the work done by Chip Morningstar. The theory behind all of this is called Object-capability Theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-capability_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-capability_model) The email addresses are what the OCAP folks would call a capability token- the ability to send an email is a capability, and the special email I give someone is a capability token, a bearer token in this case (though there are other patterns in the OCAP world). I can then make other attenuated capabilities, ie proxy capabilities that may act slightly different or serve a specific purpose- like a share link that only works for a week, or a share link that's upload only, etc. Why is all this important? Because understanding the theory will help you understand the possibilities, and also the possible flaws. Am happy to discuss further.

senko 5y ago
Capabilities don't solve double spending(or in this case, double sending) token, as they are intentionally transferrable. So you'd need to have a way to bind a capability to a sender, which naturally leads to PK, or treat them as short lived tokens you revoke as soon as you see they've leaked, which is identical to throwaway email addresses we already have.

dotancohen 5y ago

In my opinion, most of the problems with today's email systems could be solved if the recipient system would require an ε payment to the recipients' public wallet. I don't care what the value of ε is nor in which digital coin it is. But there should be a negligible cost to send email, and a benefit to the receiver. I would even go further and alot email priorities, each high priority requiring a higher payment. So my bank notifying me of an attempted login might pay a little more, but that message goes to the top of my heap. Whereas aunt sally's digital birthday card cost her near nothing and I'll get to it when I'm done with all the attempted logins to my bank. The best part of this system is that it really does not require actual money to be exchanged. If one prefers, he could just mine the coins he uses to send the mail with. That's a feature, not a bug, to keep the system inclusive for all low-volume senders but far less so for spammers. It also makes scamming far less lucrative.

teddyh 5y ago
Please read https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt and check all boxes that apply to your post yourself. Ideas such as yours have been around since the mid-1990’s and have been debated to death since then, so much so that the aforementioned template was created.
- tomjen3 5y ago
  That template essentially shot down any discussion of fixing email in the open source space, and so companies like Slack, Google and MSFT were able to create walled gardens that can only be interacted with by their systems or by email senders they consider secure enough. If, instead of creating that template, somebody had made Thunderbird send PoW headers and priotize those that had it, maybe we would have been in a freer world.
  - teddyh 5y ago
    And yet, nobody who could have made that change in Thunderbird thought it would be a good idea to do that. This is how ideas are evaluated and either adopted or rejected.

regnull 5y ago

I was working on something quite similar for the last year. It’s an email system based on digital identities, where every piece of outgoing mail is encrypted and signed. It works with the existing email infrastructure by having a gateway which does encryption for the incoming mail and decrypts the outgoing mail. There is also a IMAP/SMTP bridge to allow any existing email client to work with the system. Eventually the identity registry will be decentralized, choosing the right blockchain is the tricky part. https://ubikom.cc https://ubikom.cc

smallbizdev420 5y ago

I would like some feedback on a possible solution to one of the problems: Spam. And my proposed solution is blockchain. Hear me out :-) What if sending a mail required a proof of work (the digital equivalent of a stamp)? Then sending mail in bulk would be costly enough to lessen the spate of spam. Unstamped mail would be spam unless the recipient agreed to accept it without the stamp. Legal bulk mail senders could obtain stamps in bulk providing they agree to abide by the rules (no tracking, easy unsubscribe etc.) and provide proof of doing so. By allowing unstamped mail to be delivered, yet be contingent on the receipients choice, I think we can deal with older clients that can't be updated, noble causes etc. Feedback welcome.

smusamashah 5y ago
This is already proposed in the article. You probably haven't read it or may be I misunderstood what author meant by requiring proof of work to avoid spam.
zajio1am 5y ago
Does not work against spambot networks on hacked computers.
- smallbizdev420 5y ago
  Doesn't it, though? Wouldn't it mean you'd need more hacked computing resources for sending the same amount of mail?
  - throwaway984393 5y ago
    It's an economics problem then. They'd send less spam but they'd be paid more for each mail sent.
tyingq 5y ago
Mentioned in another comment here, but you're describing hashcash: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash

jqpabc123 5y ago

The main problem with email is simple lack of privacy in my opinion. Privacy is the primary attraction of instant messaging. End to end encryption is OK but most users don't really need it and it tends to complicate operations. Fixing the privacy issue doesn't require any changes to protocol or email clients. The solution is really just a configurable email forwarding service. Every user should have both a public email address used for sending and a private email address used for receiving. The mail server automatically replaces the private address with the public address on all outgoing mail. Received mail gets forwarded from public to private only if it meets certain rules setup on the mail server. Otherwise, the address is rejected as unknown. A simple rule set would be a list of allowed addresses. If an address is not on the list, it gets rejected. Addresses are automatically added to the allow list by sending an outbound message to the recipient's address OR by sending a coded message to the mail server. Likewise, an address can be deleted from the list by sending a coded message to the mail server. If you actually want email from anyone, don't apply any rules. What does a "coded message" look like? How about one addressed to the target but with an empty body and either "!ADD" or "!DEL" as the subject? I have considered building this myself on occasion but all the reputation machinations currently in place that attempt but largely fail to address the spam problem act as a deterrent.

cogman10 5y ago
I'd call spam one of the biggest problems with email. To solve it, I'd say a protocol extension is needed. In the ideal case, you could have a certificate authority and everyone's email gets signed. Spam and get your cert revoked globally. That would be hard to pull off though.
- dboreham 5y ago
  This has been tried (several times). Email server operators are too lazy to configure it. Spammers subvert the servers that do have it configured.
- jqpabc123 5y ago
  Spam is the lack of privacy I was referring to. To solve it, I'd say a protocol extension is needed. Or maybe a protocol reduction. The relay system is the source of lots of evil and was really designed for a bygone era. Eliminate "open" relays --- only accept email directly from the source server --- and most spam goes away with a simple privacy filter as I described above. It is easy to "spoof" an address, much harder to "spoof" a server.

upofadown 5y ago

I totally agree that email, and messaging in general, would be much better if we solved the identity issue. I don't agree that there is anything particularly broken about the two existing standards to do this. The last thing we need is another standard for signing email. The root problem is that we treat anonymous email (unsigned) the same as email from people we know (signed by such a person). Treating anonymous email with normal suspicion pretty much solves the problems with email ... as pointed out in the article. I think there is a tendency to want to solve a technical problem, even when no such problem exists. This will ultimately have to be solved at the people level.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
kwhitefoot 5y ago
> Treating anonymous email with normal suspicion pretty much solves the problems with email I have a rule in Thunderbird that directs all email from senders not in my contacts list to a separate folder instead of the inbox.

Rochus 5y ago

Isn't there already a viable technical solution in use for all listed issues? E.g. spam/scam can be avoided by SPF (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sender_Policy_Framework https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sender_Policy_Framework), identity verification and encpryption is solved by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S/MIME https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S/MIME.

kajiryoji 5y ago
For one, S/MIME certificates all require a non-trivial amount of yearly price.
- Rochus 5y ago
  I use a free self-signed one just for the purpose of encryption. But there are also providers where you can get identity verifiably certificates for free.
sbuk 5y ago
You'd be surprised at how many sending domains do not have SPF configured correctly. When you look at DKIM and DMARC, it get worse...
bsdubernerd 5y ago
I think the article misses the mark. The #1 problem is spam, but spam is mostly a social issue, not a technical one. Case in point: 90%+ of my spam is currently delivered by google. Either using fake accounts and/or hacked ones. That spam passes _all_ the technical solutions we have put in place today: SPF/DKIM/DMARC. Sure, the SMTP protocol isn't that great in today's light, but you think changing the protocol would solve it? Say hello to whatsapp spam, facebook's messenger spam, and so on...
- Rochus 5y ago
  My spam filter works very reliably for all such cases; my first and only manual rule I had to add recently was to stop "bitcoin" spam delivered by Jira accounts; and I also check the filtered messages from time to time. I think there will be spam with any protocol we might get in future.

edward 5y ago

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22847092 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22847092

rendx 5y ago

DeltaChat has an interesting approach to extending email and open standards towards something that feels like "instant messaging", but incorporates a lot of cool features: Bots, multiparty chats, games, e2ee, p2p mode etc: https://delta.chat/ https://delta.chat/

danrl 5y ago

Today’s mail servers often don’t know who’s in the receiver’s address book or who they have received mail from before. That seems to be an untapped source for scoring on the server site. If the SMTP server also hosts the mailbox, and can access well known folders (Archive, All Mail, Junk) it could quickly decide after the RCPT TO how to react. Options: Slowing down to increase sender’s cost, requiring proof of work (hashcash style SMTP extension), adding scoring information for spam filters, issue a temporary unavailable (gray listing), you name it. Some have contact lists and email from the same provider and synced to the cloud (e.g. gmail/gcontacts; e.g. iCloud+ email hosting and icloud sync for contacts). One would expect these data sources work together, but it seems that today at best one informs the spam filter of the other, and not necessarily server side. There is potential in moving the smartness to earlier stages of the transmission where the sender is also bearing some of the costs. JMAP (sic!) is a good step to standardize syncing here. Still think there is untapped potential even there.

jcranmer 5y ago
> Today’s mail servers often don’t know who’s in the receiver’s address book or who they have received mail from before. One of the big revolutions in antispam was reputation-based, which is used in all large email providers. Effectively, every email domain gets a reputation based on their email history. Someone like @gmail.com that sends a lot of mail to the server that isn't spam is going to get through easily. Someone like @spammymcspamface.com that sends naught but spam is going to get black holed. Someone like @whoami.com who hasn't sent anything is going to get throttled until they can establish a reputation as not-spammy.
- danrl 5y ago
  Reputation is, however, not weighted by data tied to the individual receiver's mailbox. Reputation is often tied to the sending domain. Reputation, as helpful as it is, doesn't tap into the data that currently remains largely untapped.

throwaway984393 5y ago

To solve 'strangers can send me email' you don't need any fancy crypto. Randomly generated long aliases work great, as they can forward to your address with an "alias[.+]" prefix or "[.+]alias" postfix, and you can kill the aliases that receive spam. Killing an alias should send all such mail to spam, or result in a bounce back. If we can push that functionality into the MTA / MDA (along with a general spam button) the mail servers can learn and respond to spam that happens across all their user accounts and either start to deliver mail into Spam folders or push back on mail deliveries with either a delay or bounce. I am concerned that charging even a penny per email would make it harder for people in developing nations to send mail (you need to understand how insanely poor some people are), and those are the countries that spammers might take advantage of. We should be very careful in today's world not to make technology that negatively affects the most vulnerable.

twobitshifter 5y ago
Isn’t it trivial to remove the alias from the address?
- throwaway984393 5y ago
  Actually I meant you make the "public" e-mail address totally random, like "ksdjfksjlfdjasljhflsk@whatever.com". That address then forwards to "yourname+ksdjfksjlfdjasljhflsk@whatever.com". Then both your client and mail server will know both the "public" part of the address, and who it's supposed to really be delivered to. This enables spam filtering on a specific alias, or killing a specific alias. Additional support would need to be added to handle these features, and also automatically translating replies from your mail client so the From: address continues to be hidden. This idea mostly already exists in proprietary e-mail relays like Craigslist email addresses, but it would be nice if it were a standard.

lmilcin 5y ago

On the other hand, as much as I dislike Google, I use Google to filter spam on my email on my own domain and it seems to be extremely effective at that particular job. Over past 6 or 7 years I have been using Google I remember only one case when valid mail was classified as spam. I receive about 10-20 spam a day and I get about one spam into my inbox per month. In the past I would use catch all on my domain and give addresses like adobe.com@<my-domain> to companies. It led to some fun stories like when I started getting a lot of spam to adobe.com@<my-domain> and Adobe support (I have been paying customer -- no more) claiming that they have absolutely not lost any of my information even though I could positively verify my adobe.com@<my-domain> address and password was available in one of publicly available databases. Nowadays I am using more and more SSO + MFA and it kind of makes that pattern less useful.

maw 5y ago
Of the 100 most recent emails I have marked as spam in gmail, 26 were misclassified. FWIW, just an anecdatum and probably a real outlier and all that.

posix86 5y ago

What we need is a trustless trust infrastructure on which identities can be verified by anyone. Governments around the globe can verify their citizen's and companies identities as well as each others, until we have a decentralized network of trust that includes all people and relevant corporal and organisational entities. Emails are signed by all of these entities, and people choose which emails they'd like to consider through choosing trust providers, a role that'd be taken by governments or other organisations. Hence we get a distinction of emails generated by people and corporate accounts; and corporate accounts can be blocked until their communication behavior is determined acceptable. Communication challenges between corps and people suddenly are worth being treated right because they can be closed any second. Communication channels between pairs of entities _exist_, that's the first innovation actually.

pixl97 5y ago
> a role that'd be taken by governments or other organisations It sounds like it would be in governments best interest to control this, so they can inject their own fake identities, much like they do with spies now. Also, how does one revoke ones identity if one loses control of it. I mean, identity theft is common currently?

barbarbar 5y ago

There seems to be less spam for SMS. At least I does not seem to be a problem? So maybe the idea of a small fee for the sender is not bad?

GeneralMaximus 5y ago
This is not true in India, at least. There is so much SMS spam here that everyone defaults to WhatsApp for any kind of actual communication with a human. SMS is reserved for bank OTPs, 2FA, and and and endless deluge of marketing messages.
fncypants 5y ago
SMS spam is exploding for some.[1] A good 25% of my messages are from an address like 1a02341234e7@uyah23f.com. [1] https://www.dallasnews.com/business/technology/2021/09/28/dont-click-that-link-the-plague-of-text-message-spam-is-getting-worse-especially-for-texans/ https://www.dallasnews.com/business/technology/2021/09/28/do...
- barbarbar 5y ago
  Oh - I had no idea. Since I have not even got one.

yholio 5y ago

This is a low effort proposal and the author seems blissfully unaware of the long and varied history of proposed alternatives to email. Alternate proposals have failed and will always fail due to the ingrained nature of email. Nobody is going to use a new email system that allows communication to zero or very few recipients, and the system can never bootstrap. And that's that, no alternative to email will succeed if its only claim to fame is that is "email done right", that's a much too weak feature to break SMTP's decades of first mover advantage. To break this clinch, you need to either: 1. deliver a communication product that has much superior features, and incidentally does mail very very well; people will start to use it for the other features, play with its email subset functionally, and in many, many, many years, the email will wither and die. Up to now, despite many claims to the contrary, no one managed to do that. The average lifespan of instant messaging protocols is around two decades (anyone on ICQ or Yahoo anymore?), while email is going strong into its 50s. 2. backport those advanced features into SMTP so that they are interoperable with the existing infrastructure AND, at the same time, deliver a tangible benefit to the people using those features, AND deliver those benefits today, not into some distant future where most people start to use it (PGP, where are you). This is a very hard set of conditions and very few technologies have managed to fulfill them, as a consequence email has evolved very slowly. So if you don't want to have the old "canned letter response making fun of your antispam system" rubbed in your face, you better start working on number 1. or number 2.

WalterBright 5y ago
Features can be added as long as they are backwards compatible, by adding another tag for it. For example, the tag could be your public encryption key. Then, your email app, whenever it receives a public key from a sender, the app now knows their public key and can send them encrypted messages. Those without the public key, get the plaintext email. This can all happen completely without any action on the part of the user. Over time, it will gradually become ubiquitous, like https did.
- akerl_ 5y ago
  Attempting to bolt public key onto encryption is one of the many things that’s already been attempted multiple times. We can see from those attempts that it’s not worked, for a variety of reasons.

throwawayboise 5y ago

Email is fine. It's simple, it maps very well to peoples' intuitive real-world understanding of "mail" and it works. I've had the same email address for decades. I get some spam, but I don't drown in it. I get more spam in the real (postal) mail, if you measure by the ratio of spam mail to legitmate mail. And I get real mail that is spam but looks legitimate on first inspection. It's generally very easy to identify spam email, and delete it. I can almost always do this by the sender and subject line alone, without opening the message. It takes less time to do this than it does to periodically peruse your spam folder for false postives. Encryption/digital signatures that rely on any kind of PKI architecture won't work, because most people don't understand it or won't trust it or both. What might work is ssh-like "trust on first contact." You get a signed email from a friend. You get a little notice "you haven't seen this signature before, do you want to trust it." You can turn it off if you don't want to bother with this, and you need to be able to easily revoke the trust if you make a mistake (so even this is getting complicated). The keys need to be generated with no more complexity than "ssh-keygen" (and I work with many people, college-educated, who can't manage even that). I'm in tech, I do it for a living. I don't sign my email, and I don't verify signatures on the signed email I get. If I don't think it's worth the bother, my mom certainly won't.

notriddle 5y ago
> I get some spam, but I don't drown in it. I get more spam in the real (postal) mail, if you measure by the ratio of spam mail to legitmate mail. And all it cost was IP reputation systems that undermine email’s claim to be decentralized, language heuristics that undermine its claim to be reliable, and greylisting that undermine its claim to be fast.
- insulanus 5y ago
  Don't forget the centralization that undermines its ability to be private!
rakoo 5y ago
> What might work is ssh-like "trust on first contact." Deltachat is working like that and I can't wait for the day everyone switches to an alternative client that behaves like it is from this century, like deltachat, instead of the last one. Who actually needs the following ? - open a different window (ie a different context) than the one you're currently in - a greetings line - quoting the entire mail you're replying to - the choice of whether you include an attachment inline or as a real attachment - threads that you can't have a glance at because messages are in different mailboxes (inbox, archive, Sent, ...) - having to click on each message to read the conversation instead of having it all in one view that you can just scroll (thanks Gmail for doing this correctly) - a custom signature no one really reads Email's basis works, but we still use it like we wrote snail mail. No one writes snail mail anymore. It's time we use it in a more modern manner.

blamestross 5y ago

Everything here assumes the existence of some sort of method to associate a random string with an identity and enough data about that identity to find a server to talk to, without having an initial server to talk to...

charles_f 5y ago

Pgp and such could solve a lot of this, if only Gmail were to implement it. But if they did, they would in a proprietary and non interoperable way, because everyone is building their own little castle rather than the highways between nowadays, and if you want to communicate "securely" with your neighbour, you'll have to install a 7th chat app on your phone