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Email immutability matters more in a world with AI
- blibble 1y ago> The world is changing, and we need to adapt and understand it. fastmail: read my lips: I pay you because you offer a traditional email service if you add a single AI feature I will return to self hosting
- toomuchtodo 1y ago+1 as a fastmail family account customer.
- mbesto 1y agoSame here. Fastmail customer for slowly peeling myself away from gmail. Just keep giving me reliable email service and I'll pay you.
- barbazoo 1y agoIs there such a thing as a family account? > Add a user to your billing plan to give someone their own Fastmail Inbox and login. Build your team, be it work or family, and share calendars, contacts and more. Give users extra addresses for free The way my UX works is I can add users but they always have to have their own paid plan. Makes sense for heavy email users but not so much for my partner or our kids. I was hoping there was a 5 accounts for the price of 3 thing like Spotify et al do.
- spott 1y agoThey have a “family” plan on their pricing page. “For up to six in a family. Private, secure email for everyone.”
- withinboredom 1y agoAnd all these services doubling or even trippeling their price to offer the same thing ... but with AI! I'd happily pay fastmail double the price, without the AI.
- gdulli 1y agoHeard, but let's not give them ideas.
- jimbo808 1y agoI genuinely tried to embrace them, but I have found these AI "enhancements" to be utterly useless. Very rare that they can answer the question I'm having about the product. I'm not sure what the norms are for how these assistants are trained or fine tuned for the specific products they're being offered in, but it seems that they're pretty bad. They don't seem to know anything about the product you're using them in.
- neutronicus 1y agoWe ship an AI assistant with our product. I am attempting to dogfood it, as I am pretty close to the target audience. I, a dev, get a bug report "X doesn't work". I have never heard of "X". Ask the AI assistant instead of Googling it or asking on Slack. Google's AI overview is basically always better (and delivered sooner) than our own proprietary AI assistant.
- daveguy 1y agoThe entire article is about protecting against AI, and their internal policy on AI use. No new features mentioned.
- blibble 1y agoit doesn't hurt to dispel the illusion that "existing product plus AI equals more money"
- daveguy 1y agoTrue, that is a good point. And rethinking the article, it could be considered relevant even though the article didn't mention new features. Hopefully "product + AI" doesn't get us as big of a crash as "product + Internet" did in 2000. Pointing it out probably helps.
- 28304283409234 1y agoSame. Family account. Stay simple.
- dlcarrier 1y agoSelf hosting? I can't even visit simple static web pages without Cloudflare blocking me because my web browser isn't sufficiently trackable. There's no way they're letting self-hosted email messages get through.
- drnick1 1y agoThis is a myth. I self-host email and don't have deliverability issues. What matters is domain age, IP, and compliance with DKIM/DMARC.
- DamonHD 1y agoSame here. Self hosting (STMP, DNS, etc) for ~30Y.
- gjgtcbkj 1y agoProve it.
- drnick1 1y agoWhat is there to prove? You can register your own domain (avoid exotic TLDs), wait a few months to build trust, and use an email setup script like Luke Smith's to set up Postfix/Dovecot. Before you start sending email, use mail-tester.com to check that DKIM is correctly set up and that your IP is not blacklisted.
- Cu3PO42 1y agoIs it? Last time I tried to self-host my email I did. I had DKIM, DMARC and SPF set up correctly as verified by multiple sites, but I couldnt't get reliable delivery to any Microsoft-hopsted mailboxes. Every other provider I tested was perfectly happy with my mail, unfortunately MS is too big a provider to ignore them. > What matters is domain age, IP, and compliance with DKIM/DMARC. Maybe it was my IP, but I cycled a few with my hosting provider and none of them made a difference. If I am unable to reliable obtain a 'trusted' IP, what good does it do? I switched to hosted email and all my delivery issues were gone.
- Mizza 1y agoCame here to say this. I use fastmail am quite happy with it because I just want a reliable inbox and nothing else. Just keep it running and don't touch anything else.
- Gigachad 1y agoTbh I do wish Fastmail would add some kind of automatic email classification like Gmail added many years ago to filter the newsletters out of the important email.
- tamimio 1y agoSeriously, I just need a no BS email, if I see a single bubble with some assistance im bailing out immediately.
- julianlam 1y agoThis is a surprisingly aggressive reaction after reading a blog post asserting that said company will NOT go in that direction.
- mlhpdx 1y agoInteresting take. I have decades worth of email archived, so it does ring true for me at least. I doubt anything in there is more interesting to Big Brother but who knows?
- Night_Thastus 1y agoInteresting to federal government, not likely. Interesting to marketers and scammers, absolutely.
- Night_Thastus 1y ago"An email is your copy, and the sender can’t revise it later." Sort of. They can't change plain text, but modern emails often include vast swaths of remote content. When you open the message, it retrieves the relevant assets directly from whoever sent the email. That remote content is not permanently stored. It's cached for a bit and will not be re-used if the email is opened months or years later. If those assets disappear or are changed, there's very little any email provider can do about that.
- toomuchtodo 1y agoThe provider could create a snapshot at receive and/or open (fetching these potentially mutable asset dependencies within a message), similar to what https://github.com/karakeep-app/karakeep https://github.com/karakeep-app/karakeep and https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFile https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFile do with url bookmarks, and attach it (or otherwise associate it) to the message. Optional of course. The benefit of this is senders couldn't treat it as a read receipt, because the provider can state "Our infra performs this operation for the user for immutability purposes" similar to other email operations that proxy these requests for privacy purposes.
- kenferry 1y agoModern marketing emails, yes… not emails written as correspondence. I don't think this post is talking about marketing emails.
- mikepurvis 1y agoI don't think that's really the case, is it? At least, not in any formally-specified way. Modern email clients will extract metadata for things like airline reservations, shipping trackers, ICS calendar invites, etc, and give you live tiles specific to that time-sensitive info, but it's very clearly supplementary and at least in GMail none of it is pretending to be part of the message itself.
- IanCal 1y agoImages are the clear thing that is typically remote - sometimes to the point of an email that’s entirely just an image, or rather a link to an image.
- lupire 1y agoThis is just an ad.
- azhenley 1y agoSo should I stop building my AI-first email client?
- IncreasePosts 1y agoThe article says they're fine if you want to use AI but they're not going to foist it upon you
- lydiaharrison12 1y ago[dead]
- cypherpunks01 1y agoYour own emails are immutable, if you trust nobody's modified your copy. But proving to others that an email hasn't been modified is a more difficult task. As I understand it, you'd need to retain DKIM keys for the signing server, to check that historical DKIM signatures verify correctly and the old message was not forged or altered. Are DKIM signing keys issued in some kind of Certificate Transparency log, where you can verify whether a particular DKIM key existed for a particular domain in the past, in order to do this in general?
- Alex3917 1y agoThere is at least one service that scrapes and archives the DKIM keys of popular websites.
- acdha 1y agoThey at least were not historically archived. This came up during the Hunter Biden laptop investigation where people were able to verify some of the messages only because the Gmail key was archived in many places because that service is so popular. I’m not aware of anyone making a comprehensive archive but I’d be unsurprised if someone did based on news like that. https://github.com/robertdavidgraham/hunter-dkim#but-gmails-dns-servers-no-longer-provide-the-public-key https://github.com/robertdavidgraham/hunter-dkim#but-gmails-... EDIT: this one exists but is incomplete: https://archive.prove.email/about https://archive.prove.email/about
- bananapub 1y agopeople are trying to do the opposite - publish DKIM private keys regularly so everyone knows that old DKIM signatures can be forged, so that they can't be used against you.
- password4321 1y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25113482 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25113482 Ok Google: please publish your DKIM secret keys (2020-11-16, 583 points, 749 comments)
- Imnimo 1y ago>In a world where there’s enough AI capability to process the entire web and rewrite every page to remove something, the cost of “changing history” is much reduced, so we can expect more of it. I gotta be honest, this scenario is not a concern that impacts my choice of email provider.
- estimator7292 1y agoIs email immutable? Honestly I haven't looked into it very much, but as an email self-hoster I do know that i have the ability to decrypt any email in any user's inbox. I presume I could also edit and re-encrypt them, but I don't really know. But as in all cases, you can only be truly sure no one is tampering if you don't give it to anyone else.
- kuroguro 1y agoClearly we need blockchain to solve this, not AI! /s
- neuroelectron 1y agoGeneral web immutability matters more than ever and not just because of AI. Please support archive.org and its sister sites.
- pkilgore 1y agoKagi & Fastmail are two of my favorite bills to pay.
- myhf 1y agoI stopped paying for Kagi because they added AI.
- instagraham 1y agoThe immutability of documentation tech matters more in a world with AI. The cameras used to document "news" will need to be watermarked, fingerprinted and authenticated, like what Canon and Nikon are already doing (and which AFP has already adopted). It may have seemed gimmicky at first, but in a year or two, you'll probably only be able to trust visuals from companies that do this (wire agencies like AFP, AP and Reuters are heavily disincentivised to create fake news anyway but that's another topic). At a certain level, I imagine social media apps will also encourage direct camera-to-post for documentation/videos of reality, since this will be the only end-to-end method to verify an image was created unaltered. I can imagine a world where, if you film a protest through the Instagram app, you'd get some kind of "this is real" badge on it, whereas if you upload a video, it gets treated as "could be AI" like 99% of all future content.
- gmueckl 1y agoOn the other hand, this requires locked down devices running trusted apps. Otherwise, such a badge won't have any meaning.
- vlovich123 1y agoI think it’s already irrelevant: cryptographic proofs of video evidence is difficult to communicate to audiences while watermarks will be learned by AI as trusted and injected into AI videos anyway. Also, in between the lens and your eyeball is usually a pipeline of editing applied anyway so either the cryptographic signature ends up with every layer signing the modifications applied + the previous layer or you stack watermarks. But ultimately the original problem is how to communicate the cryptographic chain validity.
- JambalayaJimbo 1y agoCommunication is a different story, do we know whether it’s possible in the first place? And that requires device integrity.
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- odyssey7 1y agoNo mention of the blockchain?
- NoSalt 1y agoCommercial for FastMail???
- kalap_ur 1y agoI mean, to be fair, Google's scam of how much GBs you have is very annoying and downright scandalous. I had 16.5GB or so used up so it was flashing red. When paid for Gemini, my total space jumped to 2TB and my usage dropped to 12GB. Disgusting. So might as well switch to fastmail. Not sure.
- drnick1 1y agoEmail has never been immutable. Email that you receive on your own server can be trivially altered, it's just a plain text file. In fact until recently email was sent and received in the clear like a postcard, the whole system wasn't designed to be secure or secret in any way.
- lexlambda 1y agoImmutable as in the message won't be altered/deleted by the sender. This is. This is about user control, as opposed to chat apps or social media, where posts are frequently edited, get taken down after an outrage or links can disappear to link-rot. From article: "An email is your copy, and the sender can’t revise it later."
- wpollock 1y agoUntil retired as a professor, I used Thunderbird and the GPG plug-in to sign emails. That makes them immutable no matter who hosts the email server you use. I encrypted the emails holding grades, if the recipient said they were able to decrypt. Setup was non-trivial but very doable. I also used (and still use) a plug-in that clearly shows if any email fails DKIM or SPF (I think DMarc too).
- pyuser583 1y agoThank you! Will look into this setup!
- throwaway_0501 1y agoBuried lede: Fastmail is using AI-generated code / words / decision-making systems, just like everyone else and following the same meaningless "principles" as everyone else. > For our staff, we encourage understanding the tools that exist in the world, and how to use them safely. Our policy makes it clear that any use of tools, including tools with AI in them, must follow clear privacy-preserving principles: Data Protection: All data protection, confidentiality, and privacy policies must be followed (our vendors for things like anti-abuse and support are moving towards using AI for translation, categorization, abuse detection – and we are ensuring that their policies continue to provide protection for our customers) Accountability for work: Any AI generated writing or code must be reviewed and understood by a human being, and go through our regular second-set-of-eyes processes before being used Bias awareness: Actively look for biases or hallucinations in AI output Human authority: Always have a path for appeal to a human from any decision that is made by automated tools
- akkartik 1y agoEmail is only part of my electronic memory. Over time it's become more important to me to maintain my own copies of my memory on devices I control. The forms and formats are many, and they all need a commitment to maintain control. So yes, use email over more mutable media. And avoid remotely mutable extensions to emails. And keep a local copy of your email. And maintain date-stamped archives of stuff you work on, and keep your codebases easy to run from any point in their history, and write good notes. Constant vigilance.
- AtlasBarfed 1y agoWhere's the AI to address the number one issue I have with email? If you count for automatically categorized Bayesian spam, it's about 99% noise. That's one of the things that sucks about the current AI. Being employed by people that that are categorically opposed to using it to enhance privacy and filter advertising.
- iwishiknewlisp 1y ago[dead]
- iwishiknewlisp 1y ago[dead]
- crossroadsguy 1y agoI have a completely unrelated question - why does their base custom domain plan starts at 60GB of storage? This has always escaped me. Not that one can use those surplus too many GBs in any other meaningful way (i.e. object storage, or something usable like Nextcloud, Seafile et cetera). This is odd. Just in case any founder or exec from Fastmail is lurking around here do have a look at it.
- withinboredom 1y ago60gb should last you a few years of not deleting anything. That also fits into how long you generally need to keep things for record purposes. It isn’t big enough to keep everything forever (which is good for privacy).