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The Future of Email

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Re: The Future of Email

#81

Post by arximboldi »

noosphr wrote: post #67
thefounder wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To have secure email I think html /css should be dropped from email support and the inbox should work on an invite only basis. Basically you should pre-authorize the senders just like you add someone as friend on a social network.

Email supports text. It's your client that's the problem. I'm happy in my text only Emacs heaven. I'm also happy with my custom 5 year old bert based spam detector which hasn't failed me once (unlike whatever gmail at work does). This post was sent from Emacs.

can you post some details about the spam detector, and just your general setup? I am also an emacs-emailer, using Notmuch, but never looked too deep into the spam story

Re: The Future of Email

#82

Post by jader201 »

JimDabell wrote: post #70
thefounder wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To have secure email I think html /css should be dropped from email support and the inbox should work on an invite only basis. Basically you should pre-authorize the senders just like you add someone as friend on a social network.

> To have secure email I think html /css should be dropped from email support I don’t think that helps at all. We already know how to consume that securely, we do it billions of times a day in web browsers. > the inbox should work on an invite only basis. Basically you should pre-authorize the senders just like you add someone as friend on a social network. Yes. A fundamental problem with email is that the only thing…

> A “friend request” mechanism is one way of achieving this.

But then you’re left dealing with spam “friend requests”, which is still something I have to take action on, filter out, or ignore — same as spam email.

Re: The Future of Email

#83

Post by dgellow »

eggbrain wrote: post #80

I feel we need a "proof of work by human" for emails. Something that could be signed that attests that someone took the time to write the email, not just sent a template / used AI to auto-generate a personal looking email, etc. Sure that could be gamed as well (have an AI write characters one by one to look more human-like), but taking more time usually is a fairly good blocker for spammers / salespersons / etc.

I would love for a proof of human work to exist, but how would you even do that? It would need to be monitoring the user activity in their email client, which isn't something that can be trusted by a server (and is pretty shady).

But that makes me think of Hashcash, that was developed to limit email spam via proof of work, but I don't think that has ever been used in practice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash (and of course wouldn't work for the proof of humanness you're talking about).

Re: The Future of Email

#84

Post by the_bear »

sverhagen wrote: post #2

I find it hard to judge how much, if at all, this will help, but I'm all for email being more secure, to the point that organizations (banks, governments, insurance companies) stop creating walled-email alternatives: please log in to our secure message center, where you can only see our messages poorly formatted, and for a short time, until we permanently delete them . I like that my Inbox is a somewhat-searchable, h…

Those "message centers" aren't just about security, they're also about compliance. For example, insurance companies need to be HIPAA-compliant which requires that they can only send health-related info to other HIPAA-compliant systems, which means signing a BAA (a contract) with those other systems. There's no way to do that with email (your insurance company can't sign a contract with every potential email host in the world, and they don't even know where the email will ultimately end up after they send it) so practically speaking, they're not legally allowed to send any health info via email.

It's extremely difficult to accurately identify which emails have health info and which ones don't (even something like a person's name or IP address could count depending on the context) so they just default to sending everything through their message center. No amount of email security could change that.

Re: The Future of Email

#85

Post by GlibMonkeyDeath »

zazuke wrote: post #58
GlibMonkeyDeath wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is basically where I (and I imagine many others) have landed with the telephone. Anyone not in my contacts goes to voice mail. Made my phone usable again.

still not many are doing it with emails. but great point, tough we all still have to pick unknown calls here and there as we expect someone, so with the email screener it's even better, as each email has a sender.

That is the drawback - sometimes important calls come from someone not in my contacts (like an emergency where someone borrowed a phone, or a contractor trying to call you.) Still, the beauty of voice mail is that, if the caller is really trying to reach you, they will leave a message. Some random number with no message is almost assuredly spam. That model wouldn't work with email (you would need an equivalent real-time notification of an email going to a spam folder, then the user would have to decide to send to spam or not send anything.)

Anyone without caller id is also suspicious. Emails have a sender, but it is also about as reliable as a caller id (i.e. not very) when it comes to identity.

Re: The Future of Email

#86

Post by zikduruqe »

vbezhenar wrote: post #20
itskokeh wrote: post #9

Emails are very important especially at this age of rapidly changing technological landscape. It's important that they're secure. Is it possible to have E2E encryption on emails?

Of course it is possible to have E2E encryption on emails. You can have E2E encryption on everything. Just use `age` and encrypt your message with sender public key. Easy.

> Easy

vbezhenar, this is your grandmother. I just got an email from you with a bunch of gobbledygook and I can't read it. /s

If it were that easy, everyone would be doing it.

Re: The Future of Email

#87

Post by [deleted] »

eggbrain wrote: post #80

I feel we need a "proof of work by human" for emails. Something that could be signed that attests that someone took the time to write the email, not just sent a template / used AI to auto-generate a personal looking email, etc. Sure that could be gamed as well (have an AI write characters one by one to look more human-like), but taking more time usually is a fairly good blocker for spammers / salespersons / etc.

[deleted]

Re: The Future of Email

#88

Post by dbdr »

eggbrain wrote: post #80

I feel we need a "proof of work by human" for emails. Something that could be signed that attests that someone took the time to write the email, not just sent a template / used AI to auto-generate a personal looking email, etc. Sure that could be gamed as well (have an AI write characters one by one to look more human-like), but taking more time usually is a fairly good blocker for spammers / salespersons / etc.

What about automated signup confirmation emails, just as one example?

Re: The Future of Email

#90

Post by nosioptar »

sverhagen wrote: post #2

I find it hard to judge how much, if at all, this will help, but I'm all for email being more secure, to the point that organizations (banks, governments, insurance companies) stop creating walled-email alternatives: please log in to our secure message center, where you can only see our messages poorly formatted, and for a short time, until we permanently delete them . I like that my Inbox is a somewhat-searchable, h…

Those secure messaging platforms make it damned near impossible to make a backup. I've seen medical clinics delete messages that would have bad for them in court.

As such, I tell anyone who sends me one to fuck off and send a real email.

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