If not Email, then what?

Questions
1

Email is a privacy invasive tech. Even if you encrypt the message body, the headers reveal a lot.

So my question is, any medium that we can use that has the security standards of signal but not for instant messaging, but for thread like structure & long form back and forth.

Note even high stakes open source / GNU software still use mailing lists & IRC for some reason lmao.

They should just move to the matrix protocol for IRC atleast.

2

Anyone?

3

There is none.

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4

Briar has feeds/post style messaging, but adoption would be very difficult. I do not find signal adoption to be much a hurdle these days, but general adoption of briar in this way would be very difficult and exclude iOS right off the rip.

https://www.privacyguides.org/en/real-time-communication/#briar

5

Briar on (W)LAN via hotspot / mesh netowork makes sense for offline messaging but I don’t think it can take over everything else.

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7

Encrypted email services are still pretty secure and private though. It’s the ones like Gmail that are not, and any email service that requires a phone number to register is poison.

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9

I think in the future Matrix is going to be the alternative to email. It doesnt have the same security guarantees as Signal but hopefully that will improve over time. Also it is federated and open.

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10

I highly doubt that.

11

Maybe not, but it is the most likely out of the options that exist today IMO

12

@Tuta_Official do you think the headers are even an issue?

13

It won’t absolutely. It’s one of the less popular apps around.

14

These technologies though are fine for this purpose as it is all public information anyway. It would be like arguing any post on this forum requires E2EE, that simply isn’t true.

I’m sure internally those people use PGP for various sensitive topics perhaps about particular security bugs. We generally see this in the form of a project PGP key or even company like Microsoft or Apple.

There’s a good reason why governments have different classification levels and everything isn’t marked as “top secret”.

9 Likes
15

I was unclear in my original post, i think that Matrix is the most likely out of the current alternatives (because of its federated and open protocol), not that it is likely to replace email.

16

any medium that we can use that has the security standards of signal but not for instant messaging, but for thread like structure & long form back and forth.

Retroshare.

Retroshare offers the following services for communication:

  • a private chat;
  • a private mailing system that allows secure communication between known friends and distant friends;
  • public and private multi-user chat lobbies;
  • a forum system allowing both anonymous and authenticated forums, which distributes posts from friends to friends;
  • a channel system offers the possibility to auto-download files posted in a given channel to every subscribed peer, similar to RSS feeds;
  • a posted links system, where links to important information can be shared;
  • VoIP calls;
  • Video calls (since version 0.6.0);
  • Tor and I2P networks support, for further anonymisation (since version 0.6.0).
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17

Hi there, Big Tech typically ignores the privacy and security issues with email headers. At Tuta, we encrypt as much email metadata as possible and you can find a third-party review of how we are doing here: https://securityheaders.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fapp.tuta.com%2F

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18

Hi there, please see our response here.

19

Tuta Mail is really great when a Tuta Mail user is communicating with another Tuta Mail user. But in my opinion, it falls apart when you’re sending an email to a user with a different email provider because Tuta Mail doesn’t support PGP, and password-protected emails have all kinds of issues.

1 Like
20

What?

Huh? So no inter-PGP? :sob:

https://mail-api.proton.me/pks/lookup?op=get&search=user.email@proton.me

@jonah

22

No representation of protonmail here??

Sad!

@jonah bring someone!!

23

Mail is so integral to modern life that it seems unlikely an alternative will emerge in the foreseeable future.