email is an extremely important technology to start supporting for privacy and freedom
No: email, even when encrypted, leaks plenty of metadata. From a privacy perspective it has been a lost cause for decades. We need new protocols.
this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2022
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Are there even any candidates at the moment? What would a next gen email look like, one that didn't leak metadata?
Matrix is the successor to email. Open spec, encryption-first design, federated, much easier to self host and possibly p2p in the future.
It leaks plenty of metadata. Also it's hardly easy to self-host.
How do you avoid leaking metadata to your server in a federated system?
By using onion routing to connect to it, as Briar does. Also by not having a server at all, again as Briar does.
Briar's server is the app itself, all federation metadata concerns also apply to p2p federation. Your briar app leaks metadata to every other device it talks with.
I don't think that is true. Matrix could be the successor to mailing lists, as it has interesting properties (anti-censorship, consensus-building) for that usecase. But so far matrix implementations are too reliant on huge databases to become practical... I hope the situation continues to improve in the coming years.
Link please, most of the search results for that don't seem to be what you're referring to.
And isn't there a way to sign into things with Matrix? Like OAuth? I thought I heard of that somewhere.
No matrix has its own auth system for signing into it. But more importantly they have bridges that can connect matrix rooms to other services, like IRC, xmpp, etc.
Does the matrix protocol even enable an inbox-message-delivery type of communication similar to email, or is it all about room synchronisation?
At least with the current clients even a 1to1 chat is a room state synchronised across the involved servers, and doesn't lend itself to managing messages in an inbox very well.
Its even better than email in that regard, you have to accept a message request before they can spam you. And it looks really no different from email, with a list of conversations being equivalent to your inbox.
An SMTP server can be set up to only accept email from addresses in your contact list, if that method of spam rejection is desired.
All the matrix clients I've tried look nothing like a typical old school (thunderbird/eudora/mutt/outlook) email inbox. It's all IRC-style chat.
I consider email excellent for exchanging and filing letters/correspondence. Conversations do happen over email but a conversational/chat layout like gmail/~matrix~element can be more suited for that communication mode.
Neither email nor chat chat layouts seem useful for (especially multi-party) discussions, where a threaded conversational layout such as used in zulip/lemmy/ discourse are more suited.
Briar is a good example.
I think tox might be a good fit.
I know this isn't super helpful in answering your question, but it would be nice if we didn't need to rely on technology like email for account creation at all. The domain name provider njalla allows for account creation using an XMPP address, and the VPN provider mullvad generates a random string of numbers as your username. If only the rest of the web followed suit.
Right. It's not just about the question but looking a little deeper to get to what it means to have a free culture. What's required. What would be done differently. This was just a specific challenge that made sense to step back a little from. If there's a principle it should be honesty about why identifying information is required and looking for alternatives.
Hosting your own receive only email is not so difficult, so you can use that for signing up on all sorts of services and forward messages to a XMPP address that looks the same.
When people complain that you never reply, just tell them to contact you through xmpp ;)
Any guides you know of?
Does this not require a domain name?
You can use a free dyndns subdomain
.ml is a fee domain name and plus, domains are only around 5-10$.
It is not an issue of cost, but of the email address catch22. A new identity has no email and doesn't .ml require that for registration?
Protonmail doesn't require an email or phone number. It just requiers your IP address for sign up
I wonder if such new accounts are even trustworthy! Sowing doubts is such a great strategy by such non-existent entities!
See table "Email Hosting market share table" https://www.datanyze.com/market-share/email-hosting--23
Google, Microsoft, and Godaddy collectively control 79% of the email market. You effectively can't deliver email if they -- the first two in particular -- say you can't. So every other provider has to dance to their tune. This is, at this point, an economic problem.
If you want to re-decentralize email, and the web overall, you have to figure out what to do about the increasing concentration of Internet infra into an ever-smaller number of hands. I'm guessing there is not a technical solution to this.
I’m guessing there is not a technical solution to this
We need dead simple turn key solutions for self hosted services. Simple as setting up a wifi router or some other consumer focused device.
Users get to use networks on terms dictated by their ISP's. My ISP blocks self-hosted email. They did so because it was not in their interest -- spammers were using the functionality to run spam ops. They still allow for self-hosting, but as self-hosting becomes more popular, ISPs' residential networks are going to become a security minefield and an increasing liability. They will tighten the screws on what people are allowed to self-host and how, or they'll just make it painful to impossible.