Live data from Hacker News

Email immutability matters more in a world with AI

fastmail.com

31–40 of 115 posts

Re: Email immutability matters more in a world with AI

#31

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…

people 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.

Re: Email immutability matters more in a world with AI

#34
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

Self 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.

Re: Email immutability matters more in a world with AI

#37
The 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.

Re: Email immutability matters more in a world with AI

#39

"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…

I 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.

Narvar's tracking emails are mostly-image

And on the one hand, it's cool as hell to see your email update itself to show tracking progress

On the other hand, just send me a new email. It's fine, I promise.

Re: Email immutability matters more in a world with AI

#40
I 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.

Post reply on HN