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by NoGravitas 3482 days ago
Signal is nice, and I use it. But it's an instant messaging system. Email has different use cases.

I think what we're going to need is a new, non-SMTP protocol, which preserves all of the good things about email, while providing e2e encryption and (pseudonymous) identity assurance. I don't know enough to be involved in designing that protocol, though, other than saying what I want to see as an end-user.
2 comments
psiconaut 3482 days ago
pond has interesting properties, I think the next generation mail will have to implement some of those ideas.

and Signal/WhatsApp comes to replace (and kill) xmpp, not email. Another issue is the generational shift away from email, that is only for Spam and Work, more and more everytime...

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NoGravitas 3481 days ago
Since Pond is hard to search for, [link attached][0].

[0]: https://github.com/agl/pond

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kkl 3482 days ago
What properties does email have that asynchronous messaging services (e.g. Signal) do not?
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ThatGeoGuy 3482 days ago
Cross-platform (Chrome web-apps don't count), Federated, Distributed, to name a few. The reason email is so entrenched is probably because of these reasons entirely. Being able to send a message from any provider to any provider certainly helped spread adoption easily.
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NoGravitas 3481 days ago
There are protocol properties, and client properties. I think some of both are important.

### Protocol

* Easily federated

* Identifiers can be memorable/meaningful (unlike phone numbers) while still being globally unique (thanks to federation)

* Device independent (not tied to a phone number, can generally use the same account on different devices)

* Can contact people you don't know/haven't met (this is possible with Signal, but they'd have to publicly share their personal cell phone number, which is a no-go).

### Client

* Optimized for longer-form, less immediate messaging (folders, drafts, rich text)

* MIME attachments (Signal supports only a limited number of predefined types of attachments)

I feel like you could probably layer an email-equivalent on top of Matrix, but I'm not 100% sure about that.

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