Email insecurity (was One of the great benefits of Open Source)

Posted Nov 6, 2025 17:21 UTC (Thu) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
In reply to: Email insecurity (was One of the great benefits of Open Source) by paulj
Parent article: Debian to require Rust as of May 2026

Once again:

The problems are not primarily technical.
Please explain to my non-technical Mom how she needs to send email to her cousin going forward.
Criminals will get around it anyway.
The problems with the current email system have so far proven too mild to spur the adoption of any of hundreds of similar proposals. See the FUSSP link I posted earlier.

Email insecurity (was One of the great benefits of Open Source)

Posted Nov 7, 2025 10:34 UTC (Fri) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (2 responses)

It's not technical, indeed.

Your mother? Probably nothing changes.... She keeps paying with her eyeballs and data. Others may choose to avoid that and pay actual money in some new communication system. That's how it already is today with email. The only thing that changes is that instead of layers of hacky side-protocols under the hood to try stop spam, you just have one clean micro-payment layer to make spam uneconomical. The business model around that, that affects UX, can vary in many ways.

You would not design a new messaging system in the way email is today.

Email insecurity (was One of the great benefits of Open Source)

Posted Nov 7, 2025 13:05 UTC (Fri) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (1 responses)

> You would not design a new messaging system in the way email is today.

Of course not. You'd design it to be controlled by a single party (ie you), only accessible via official applications (backstopped by DRM), and explicitly monetized (everyone pays-to-use *and* forced unskippable advertisements) with all payments going solely to you.

(ie the wet dream of AT&T and what every big-tech's IM system aspires to be)

Email insecurity (was One of the great benefits of Open Source)

Posted Nov 7, 2025 13:16 UTC (Fri) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

pizza is right. Anything designed today would benefit oligarchs and data brokers and oppress its "users". We should thank our lucky stars email became entrenched before the Internet enshittified.