61–70 of 216 posts
Its great that Google wants all the lines carrying data from their servers to be secure and tamper proof. It would be interesting to see if they ever support end to end encryption which would lock them out of scanning the data as well.
I would be more positive towards this if they gave precise, technical details of their notion of "supporting TLS" and "being authenticated", ideally with a service allowing me to test easily whether my mail server is fine according to them (rather than having to sign up for Gmail to test it).
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>Now I can just get a free cert and turn on TLS. What's the problem, exactly? Certs weren't free for business use until let's encrypt.
That's kind of the point. They weren't but now are, and now there's even less of an excuse not to have a cert.
The use of unencrypted or encrypted link to the receiving email provider's MX server doesn't change all that much in terms of who can read the email: it's still sitting in plaintext on the recipient's server (as well as the sender's server), and the group of actors who can sniff traffic on the backbone like that is probably just as easily able to get it from the servers.
The authentication feature is even worse. The problem of spam and phishing isn't that email claims to be from important-service@bigbank.com, it's that email claims to be from "Big Bank" . It's been noted before that spammers tend to be the most aggressive at uptaking new "anti-spam" technologies like SPF and DKIM, and this sort of validation feature seems like a prime vehicle for exploitation by spammers.
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That's kind of the point. They weren't but now are, and now there's even less of an excuse not to have a cert.
Is it possible to get a Let's Encrypt certificate without a public facing website (which is unrelated to wanted to run a mail server)?
There are really good, albeit few, alternatives: Fastmail ( https://www.fastmail.com/ ) Tutanota ( https://tutanota.com/ ) Riseup ( https://help.riseup.net/ )
+1 for fastmail. I've been using them for the past few years to host my 'other' main e-mail (the one I've had since 1994) and it's been a delight.
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Yep surprised they haven't rolled one out yet. Ideally placed.
> Yep surprised they haven't rolled one out yet. Ideally placed. In fact, they will fight tooth and nail against it since their business model relies on having access to the plain text of the message. It's the very reason they are releasing this technology: a user sees a padlock icon that's confusing similar to other "encrypted" mail offerings, for example OpenPGP. For Google, it's essential that end-to-end encryptio…
I search a lot.
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Now I can just get a free cert and turn on TLS. What's the problem, exactly? Most people are not capable of running their own mail server. The convenience of services like Google, plus the risk of turning your mail box into a spam machine, vastly outweighs the downsides for most people.
>Now I can just get a free cert and turn on TLS. What's the problem, exactly? Certs weren't free for business use until let's encrypt.
Other mailers should warn about Gmail, with "Your message was scanned for advertising purposes".