71–80 of 106 posts
The most important factor with email, is that your inbox is encrypted at rest at all times... and cannot be bruteforced. The chances of your email messages being 'man in the middled' are almost non-existent. Its a micro-percent of live investigations that does this. The police RELY ON finding messages in either your inbox or the recipients. It doesnt matter if they are encrypted or not in reality. Of course they'd li…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only because we choose it to be. When you use XMPP or Matrix you know your message will be delivered instantly. When you use email you don't. But that's only because we haven't defined an extension that tells the client whether the server can deliver messages instantly. It's not really that inherent to the system. Surely you've had at least one real-time conversation by email because both of you happened to be online…
Yes, it's theoretically possible to adapt many protocols to many use cases, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea. Email and XMPP are just geared towards very different use cases. In particular, Email has a lot of assumptions about acceptable delivery delays, bidirectional (non-)reachability etc. baked in that would be very hard to globally undo.
Ah the famously friendly UX of PGP combined with the solid reliability of email. This is trying to get two drunks to stand up straight by leaning them against each other.
In a sensible world, we would be using this, instead of whatsapp. It is amazing that even really a vast majority of, even technical people, not once stopped and looked at whatsapp, and said "Wait, e-mail can do this, we just need a pretty UI".
> "Wait, e-mail can do this, we just need a pretty UI" This reminds me on this nice comment thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19217818
that generic server backend that i am describing in my linked comment is something i am using here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42159045
I wish I could send a one-time link to my father where we could play chess against each other by re-visiting the same link. The e-mail part made me think of this. I have no use for an e-mail based chat but an online chess game that's easy to use without registration would be cool. He's 82 and he can't use complex sites.
In a sensible world, we would be using this, instead of whatsapp. It is amazing that even really a vast majority of, even technical people, not once stopped and looked at whatsapp, and said "Wait, e-mail can do this, we just need a pretty UI".
No, if anything we'd be using XMPP or Matrix. Email is the completely wrong protocol choice for instant messaging. It's just a completely different use case. You wouldn't send a letter to the fire department if your house is on fire either.
Are there some compromises? Of course. But creating new accounts, or using new services isn't one of them. Email-speed instant messaging is good enough for me.
And to be honest, as much as I like Matrix, it has plenty of compromise of its own - including speed/reliability when using their own servers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, it's theoretically possible to adapt many protocols to many use cases, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea. Email and XMPP are just geared towards very different use cases. In particular, Email has a lot of assumptions about acceptable delivery delays, bidirectional (non-)reachability etc. baked in that would be very hard to globally undo.
As programmers, is it not our natural instinct to create a ChatSystem and MailSystem on top of a GenericMessageDeliverySystem? When did we stop doing that? Creating a brand new GenericMessageDeliverySystem for each purpose comes with substantial costs. We don't reinvent the Internet to create WhatsApp.
SMTP is optimized for the use case of email; XMPP is optimized for one-to-one instant messaging; Matrix is optimized for "Slack-like" chat.
I highly doubt that these three use cases are similar enough to warrant introducing an additional common protocol/layer.
Several years ago I tried DeltaChat and it caused an insurmountable problem: my mail provider kept locking me out of my account. Almost certainly it was because DeltaChat's suspiciously ciphertext-filled messages were triggering the abuse lockdown. The provider was GMX and it was their fault, not DeltaChat's. But I had to call off the experiment.
Noting that the team have put together "Chatmail" a minimal email suite designed for speed, security and convenience.
Also helps with the whole "onboarding to chat" and multiple identities not linked to existing accounts.
https://delta.chat/en/chatmail
There are multiple public servers which may be an option, instead of using an existing email account at provider X.
My first question on this sort of thing was how well does it work with GMail. And they have an FAQ entry on it: https://providers.delta.chat/gmail
The whole purpose of using a distributed IM like Delta Chat is to break free from big data leeches like Google. If you're just using Delta Chat with a centralized Gmail server as the backend, doesn’t that defeat the point?