o***@gmail.com
2014-04-11 17:58:52 UTC
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 physicsÂŽs 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.
ANY COMMENT?
Is useless to refer magic software in test that will solve everything, but is not going to materialize ever.
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 physicsÂŽs 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.
ANY COMMENT?
Is useless to refer magic software in test that will solve everything, but is not going to materialize ever.