Re: the introduction problem, was Email and reputation (was Re: Service outages planned for April 25)

[Viktor Dukhovni <[e-mail]>]

On Tue, May 03, 2022 at 07:21:26AM -0400, Keith Moore wrote:

> > Until encrypted email is usable (**search**, long-term signature validation,
> > personal private key rollover, ...), all the key distribution tech in the
> > world won't make it worth adopting.
> 
> I wouldn't call such email entirely unusable, but clearly a system is 
> more usable (for some meaning of "usable") if encrypted emails can be 
> searched and signed emails can be verified long after such emails are 
> received.
> 
> I could take a stab at these problem and say that a message can be 
> decrypted and/or its signature verified when read (assuming of course 
> that the message is read a short time after it is sent, when the signing 
> keys and associated certs are still valid), and save their own signature 
> for the message ("message X was verified to be signed by Y by MUA Z on 
> <date>".   That's still nowhere nearly perfect, e.g. it might not hold 
> up in court as evidence that the sender of the message did or did not 
> say something.   But it's probably good enough for the recipient, for 
> most purposes, and still better than the situation we have today where 
> we have no widespread encryption or signing for emails.
> 
> (I think in that case the problem devolves to that of long term key 
> storage for the recipient, which is admittedly a difficult problem by 
> itself.)

I am not claiming that solving the UX problems is profoundly difficult,
indeed a number of design choices can make significant progress, *but*
no MUA I know of presently offers anything remotely close.  More
fundamentally, I don't see any likehood of substantial effort to improve
extant MUAs.  For example, Apple keep chipping away at *removing*
features from Mail.app:

* one can no longer compose S/MIME messages, they can only be read
* one can no longer subscribe to just a subset IMAP folders
* ...

Who's going to do the work?

-- 
    Viktor.