It's 2014. Are we there yet?

[Kapil Aggarwal]

I’ll have to disagree. I think there’s a growing sense of “uhhh
maybe these
email providers are not such a good idea after all”.

 

And something else to note. Every iOS or Android or Windows 8/mobile device
(except ChromeOS based) includes a mail “app/program” which includes POP and
IMAP functionality. And every single “webmail” provider offers alternate
means (like POP/IMAP) to access their webmail. 

 

I seriously doubt dedicated email clients are going away anytime soon. The
protocols may change over time, but there will always be a need for a
dedicated program for email.

 

From: Gnupg-users [mailto:gnupg-users-bounces at gnupg.org] On Behalf Of One
Jsim
Sent: Friday, April 11, 2014 2:16 PM
To: Gnupg-users
Subject: Re: It's 2014. Are we there yet?

 

PRELIMINARIES

 

In the '90 (I am old!) I was a moderated evangelist of the universal use of
PGP (and later GPG) and public key infrastructure (web of trust) in order to
achieve acceptable universal privacy and trust in email communication.

 

At the time I have a good comprehension of the principles involved. Although
I am  physics´s PhD, I have also been a computer buff since the '70 and
almost all my work involve and has always involved a lot of mathematics,
computers and all sort of information technologies.

 

At that time most of the people,  using email, did that through an email
client (that was usually also a news - remember usenet - client ) using  the
POP (POP3) and latter IMAP and IMAP4. protocols.

 

HOWEVER 

 

The idea NEVER took off, despite the internet users, at that time, were
quite well-informed about the technicalities of the technology they used.

 

I still maintain a neat pair of public-private keys, with an insanely
complex password, and keeping the private key itself inside a password
manager utility (keePass) together with more mundane passwords.

 

(Once in a while I use my public key to encode sensitive documents, that I
may or may not, send as email attachments).

 

FAST FORWARD

 

Nowadays most people use web-mail (gmail, yahoo, hotmail, outlook.com, etc),
not pop mail, and understand almost nothing of computer science (rare
web-mail providers let you use POP/IMAP, most times under conditions).

 

And in a very next future they will be using iOS, android, ChromeOS (all,
in any of the available versions) just to mention the more popular ones at
the moment, that not even use (E)SMTP, I think.

 

Facing those facts I concluded that the idea of private email for the masses
is not feasible in the near future.

 

Write a document->encrypt with public key->send as an email attachmente
(better as compressed RAR) is the only option I found useful yet. To sign
the document  can also be useful.

 

ANY COMMENT?

 

Is useless to refer magic software in test that will solve everything, but
is not going to materialize ever. 

 

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