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The Future of Email

fastmail.com

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Re: The Future of Email

#201

Post by ruslan »

BatteryMountain wrote: post #179
ruslan wrote: post #159

> The second is AI assistance: tools that summarize your inbox, surface action items, draft replies, and in some cases take actions on your behalf. That is the most evil part. Finally we will have bots talking to bots, no human in the loop. All email problems can be solved with GPG, but that ruins Fastmail and other email services business, as they won't be able to read and analyze their users' emails. No ads, no sel…

Preach. Exactly. We will eventually be forced down this path though, be patient! Upfront key exchange in-person will be the only way left to prove comms are real. GPG is just one path but someone will come along and make it easy on organizational level.

Delta Chat is an email client I use and advise to my correspondents, it does GPG stuff quite comfortably. Yet it still requires understanding of the process.

Re: The Future of Email

#202

Post by Diti »

danielhep wrote: post #138
Diti wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about the fact it’s a US-based product so you’re under forced Five Eyes data collection?

Almost every email is going to or coming from US servers anyway. Better to treat email as insecure and use something else for more secure communication.

Good point, thank you (and the other commenters)!

Re: The Future of Email

#203

Post by ruslan »

IncandescentGas wrote: post #193
ruslan wrote: post #159

> The second is AI assistance: tools that summarize your inbox, surface action items, draft replies, and in some cases take actions on your behalf. That is the most evil part. Finally we will have bots talking to bots, no human in the loop. All email problems can be solved with GPG, but that ruins Fastmail and other email services business, as they won't be able to read and analyze their users' emails. No ads, no sel…

Fastmail reads or analyzes users email to sell ads? Fastmail trains ai models on their user's email messages? Metadata is more valuable than message content for analysis. GPG solves that how?

> Fastmail reads or analyzes users email to sell ads? Fastmail trains ai models on their user's email messages?

Even though they have not been caught, it does no mean they are not doing so. We live in the world of zero trust.

> Metadata is more valuable than message content for analysis. GPG solves that how?

In most cases yes, only From: and To: headers are exposed.

Re: The Future of Email

#204

Post by mthoms »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #194
mthoms wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Fastmail desktop app is literally a wrapped version of their website but with the added feature of... get this... no back button (or equivalent shortcut). My 30 years of muscle memory using webmail is made useless by this "app" because some web developer somewhere wants to cosplay as a desktop app developer now. It's not an oversight either. It's an intentional choice to not have a go-back-to-previous-page keyboa…

It might be worth learning their hotkeys because they're pretty efficient in many cases (potentially included cases where you want the back button). They work in the browser and the app: https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/360058753534-Key... Not saying your complaint is invalid at all.

Thanks, yes they are all perfectly reasonable.

It's just a weird choice to make. It's like they are forgoing the back hotkey to make it seem more like a "native" app. But it clearly isn't, and I can't think of any good reason to consciously omit it. Or... since they are likely using a framework (Tauri maybe? I haven't checked) to go out of their way to disable something that is already baked-in.

Re: The Future of Email

#205

Post by danielhep »

mthoms wrote: post #190
danielhep wrote: post #21

I love fastmail, I switched from Proton a couple years ago after deciding the trade offs to have encrypted email were not worth it, since even if I fully trust Proton, most emails come from or go to AWS, Outlook, or Gmail anyway. I have been extremely happy with the service. Fairly priced, very fast even with a huge inbox, and they don’t add unnecessary features or bloat. I thought I would use my OS’s mail apps but t…

The Fastmail desktop app is literally a wrapped version of their website but with the added feature of... get this... no back button (or equivalent shortcut). My 30 years of muscle memory using webmail is made useless by this "app" because some web developer somewhere wants to cosplay as a desktop app developer now. It's not an oversight either. It's an intentional choice to not have a go-back-to-previous-page keyboa…

fair. I use the webapp on desktop

Re: The Future of Email

#206

Post by jen729w »

shevy-java wrote: post #74
jen729w wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Basically you should pre-authorize the senders This is kinda what 'masked email' services like Fastmail's – of which I am a delighted customer – do. Until you've known the comfort of creating an address; giving it to a service; deciding that you want to end your relationship with them; just deleting that address, without changing your mailbox or infrastructure or archives or anything else … it's kinda life changing…

Damn it - ublock origin did not block this promo. The amount of bots promoting Fastmail here is insane. What the actual ...

Is it detecting bots? Or just matching ‘fastmail’?

A bot I am not.

Re: The Future of Email

#207

Post by b112 »

inigyou wrote: post #195
b112 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you go to jail.

You might go to jail, you might make $1000. Crimes usually require criminal intent.

I spoke of licensing, for unrestricted internet access. No one will have unrestricted access otherwise.

The criminal intent was giving somebody without a license, access to your gear to spoof you. If someone is too ignorant to not know what that means, then they would never acquire a license.

Re: The Future of Email

#208

Post by jcgl »

upofadown wrote: post #36

>Anyone can put anything in the “From” field of an email. ... and then the article goes on to talk about SPF, DKIM and DMARC which authenticates only the domain part of the "From" field. So just the reputation of the email server, not the entity that sent you the email. If things get as bad with AI generated deception as suggested by the article this wouldn't be good enough, we would have to start signing our emails…

You’re mistaken: DKIM always signs the entire From field. Signing is done on the MTA, so yes, it is “the reputation of the server” like you say, but “server” can be a relatively granular thing here, using different DKIM selectors for different addresses, MTAs, etc.

Re: The Future of Email

#209

Post by upofadown »

jcgl wrote: post #208
upofadown wrote: post #36

>Anyone can put anything in the “From” field of an email. ... and then the article goes on to talk about SPF, DKIM and DMARC which authenticates only the domain part of the "From" field. So just the reputation of the email server, not the entity that sent you the email. If things get as bad with AI generated deception as suggested by the article this wouldn't be good enough, we would have to start signing our emails…

You’re mistaken: DKIM always signs the entire From field. Signing is done on the MTA, so yes, it is “the reputation of the server” like you say, but “server” can be a relatively granular thing here, using different DKIM selectors for different addresses, MTAs, etc.

A signature is not authentication in itself. It is only such if the signing entity is in some way restricting what it is willing to sign. The domain part of the email address in the "From" field is so restricted. The signing MTA will only sign domains that it controls. Otherwise it would suffer a loss of reputation. The user part of the address is not so restricted.

The name part of the email address is also part of the same signature but is not being authenticated either.

Re: The Future of Email

#210

Post by sylware »

cryo32 wrote: post #53
sylware wrote: post #47

email is turning into a walled-garden of big tech. For instance, I am self-hosted, that without DNS. The email designers were carefull to make the email system work without DNS, that with email addresses with IP literals: mailbox@[x.x.x.x] and mailbox@[ipv6:...] (and I guess once ipv4 is really gone, the ipv6: prefix will be dropped). This is stronger thas SPF, since as soon as a IP literals in the envelope and the v…

I think it's more they simply don't register small tech and self-hosting. In time there will be a reckoning though. The geopolitical instability at the moment will see the end of the US dominant services used outside of the US so they will have to work out how to make a not small but balkanised email provider model work again.

They are doing it slowly, maliciously (they know). On top of that, you add complicit or severely brain-washed political support (look at my country or EU) on technical 'standards'.

Fixing that level of corruption/brain washing is now going to hurt bad.

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