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Email immutability matters more in a world with AI

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Re: Email immutability matters more in a world with AI

#21

Post by cypherpunks01 »

Your 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?

Re: Email immutability matters more in a world with AI

#22

Post by munk-a »

Night_Thastus wrote: post #7

"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 d…

When it's a silly marketing email - sure. But you'd be surprised how hard you need to work as a sender to ensure that your content will render correctly if your business is actually to deliver information via email. Remote content is ignored by default by almost all modern email clients (since developers got sneaky and started using it for tracking) so a good email with rich content is usually embedding all that content into a multi-part email and leveraging static styling rules to provide as much formatting as possible.

Re: Email immutability matters more in a world with AI

#23

Post by Imnimo »

>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.

Re: Email immutability matters more in a world with AI

#24

Post by Alex3917 »

cypherpunks01 wrote: post #21

Your 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…

There is at least one service that scrapes and archives the DKIM keys of popular websites.

Re: Email immutability matters more in a world with AI

#25

Post by estimator7292 »

Is 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.

Re: Email immutability matters more in a world with AI

#26

Post by barbazoo »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #4
blibble wrote: post #2

> 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

+1 as a fastmail family account customer.

Is 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.

Re: Email immutability matters more in a world with AI

#27

Post by acdha »

cypherpunks01 wrote: post #21

Your 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…

They 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-...

EDIT: this one exists but is incomplete: https://archive.prove.email/about

Re: Email immutability matters more in a world with AI

#29

Post by spott »

barbazoo wrote: post #26
toomuchtodo wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 as a fastmail family account customer.

Is 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 hop…

They have a “family” plan on their pricing page. “For up to six in a family. Private, secure email for everyone.”

Re: Email immutability matters more in a world with AI

#30

Post by jimbo808 »

withinboredom wrote: post #6
blibble wrote: post #2

> 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

And 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.

I 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.
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