Re: [Endymail] Off we go...

(Unrelated to previous discussion)

Food for thought:

One thought I had a while back was the merits of hash-based email
addressing, where the address is a relatively short hash of an account's
public key (just like PGP fingerprints). The idea was that the email
address itself can validate the PK, and the PK can be automatically
retrieved from anywhere (key servers, mail provider). This could allow a
mail client to completely transparently handle key management and email
encryption/decryption/signing.

While the email address is non-human-sensible, the mail client can provide
local user-chosen bindings, similar to how a contact book on a phone maps a
name to phone #s. Certainly there are other usability challenges as well
though. Perhaps proper user interfaces can make dealing w/ a hash-address
not too much of a burden.

Ultimately this is not really different from PGP; we're merging an email
address and fingerprint in PGP into a single "hash-based" email. But the
idea was that in this scheme people would only conceptually deal w/ an
email address (granted non-sensible). They don't need to be aware of keys,
fingerprints, or web of trust, which might help usability. Certainly the
idea has issues though, food for thought.

On Thu, Aug 28, 2014 at 1:57 PM, Cyrus Daboo <cyrus@daboo.name> wrote:

> Hi Phillip,
>
>
> --On August 26, 2014 at 10:23:02 PM -0400 Phillip Hallam-Baker <
> phill@hallambaker.com> wrote:
>
>  And before you start off telling me about PGP, getting that to work
>> proved so tedious I gave up
>>
>
> Right, but some major players are getting onboard with OpenPGP, as per <
> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2462852/yahoo-mail-to-
> support-end-to-end-pgp-encryption-by-2015.html>. So one would hope they
> will tackle usability given the broad scope of their user base.
>
> --
> Cyrus Daboo
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Endymail mailing list
> Endymail@ietf.org
> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/endymail
>