On Mon, Nov 25, 2013 at 1:01 AM, ianG wrote:

On 23/11/13 15:30 PM, Ralf Senderek wrote:

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On Sat, 23 Nov 2013, David Mercer wrote:

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But of course you're right about actual current usage, encrypted email is an epic fail on that measure regardless of format/protocol.

Yes, but it's about time we do something about that. Do we *exactly know why* it is such a failure?

It's an interesting question, and one worth studying for pedagogical motives. From my experiences from both sides, it is clear that both sides failed. But for different reasons. Hence, I've concluded that email is unsecurable.

Obviously. It will never be able to escape the non-body header content and third party routing, storage and analysis with any form of patching over today's mail. And it's completely ridiculous that people continue to invest [aka: waste] effort in 'securing' it. The best you'll ever get clients down to is exposing a single 'To:' header within an antique transport model that forces you to authenticate to it in order to despam, bill, censor and control you. That system is cooked, done and properly fucked. Abandon it. What the world needs now is a real peer to peer messaging system that scales. Take Tor for a partial example... so long as all the sender/recipient nodes [onions] are up, any message you send will get through, encrypted, in real time. If a recipient is not up, you queue it locally till they are... no third party ever needed, and you get lossless delivery and confirmation for free. Unmemorable node address?, quit crying and make use of your local address book. Doesn't have plugins for current clients?, so what, write some and use it if you're dumb enough to mix the old and new mail. The only real problem that still needs solved is scalability... what p2p node lookup systems are out there that will handle a messaging world's population worth of nodes [billions] and their keys and tertiary data? If you can do that, you should be able to get some anon transport over the p2p for free. Anyway, p2p messaging and anonymous transports have all been dreamed up by others before. But now is the time to actually abandon traditional email and just do it. If you build it, they will come.