For your reference, records indicate that
Jason Evans <
jse...@mailfence.com> wrote:
> First of all, I do not consider any form of instant messaging a
> replacement for email. Email is long-form communication. Instant
> messaging is not.
The line is much fuzzier than that for most people. Most emails I receive
these days are in the form of “notifications” from automated systems rather
than any sort of long conversation with people. For me, the fire-and-forget asynchronous nature of email is what I value the most.
> Right now email is like this but instant messaging is not
> an open standard. I can't write my own client for Signal, Whatsapp, etc.
> because they are proprietary nor can I run my own server.
None of those apps are the singular definition of what “instant messaging”
is. You’re free to choose IRC or XMPP if you want to use some IM platform
standardized by RFCs. In my experience, though, good ol’ SMTP+IMAP these
days can be just as fast as any of those “instant” chat solutions.
> Unencrypted metadata from email would be limited to only the email
> address of the recipient.
Why stop there? If you’re going to create a whole new system, you might as
well bake in the idea of “disposable email addresses” that allow the
recipient the ability to cut off abusive senders. Nobody is going to
switch over to a system that doesn’t solve the spam problem, so an exposed
address is a non-starter.
> All other data must be a part of the encrypted
> message. Individual servers may log incoming and outgoing times for
> messages but that data will not be visible metadata.
Sounds like transport errors would be a pain to find and fix. You really
need to flesh out how messages are going to move through your new network
such that people have some way to audit the reliability.
> Encryption is never optional.
Again, you need to flesh out what that actually means. Is there something
about SMTP that keeps you from currently encrypting all your message
content? At some level, the system needs to be data-agnostic; encryption
is *moot* when you’re just pushing around bits.
> They can then only receive emails from people
> that they have shared their key with.
No, they can then only *decrypt* them. The server will be pounded by
anyone and everyone who has their email address, with no way of knowing
what is and isn’t valid because it doesn’t have the private key or any
useful metadata. The client *will* have to download them all and process
them to look for a valid message.
I don’t like your new system. Email 1.0 still seems to be the choice for
me. Yes, clients should be improved to make some features more
approachable to the average user. But the same could be said of IRC as an
IM platform. Even NNTP could be more functional than most of the web
forums that replaced it. Closed systems are winning the day, though, so
if you want an open standard (old or new) to replace them, you have to
find a killer app that simply cannot be owned by any one company.
--
"Also . . . I can kill you with my brain."
River Tam, Trash, Firefly