[kcdev]

We likely need a better globally supported standard. I think Gmail is onto something with the "confidential" send setting, but I don't like that it's tied only to Google.

For my services that use automated emails, I only send plaintext emails and use shortlinks. No sense in wasting time trying to make an email look good on every provider and hope it's encrypted or worry about which ones it will be blocked from because they don't support encrypted.

It should be used as a notification mechanism nowadays. But we do need a better universal platform - maybe that's webpages...

[riedel]

Exactly this is the key point. This why email is still so important because it doesn't lock you into ecosystems. It comes from a time when decentralization was still valued in the internet.

I think only regulatory action could be a way out of the messenger mess (which potentially leak even more metadata). I don't want to be forced into closed telecom ecosystems by my (real life) social network. The problem with potential message routing regulation will be that governments mandate weak crypto for law enforcement.

So I guess email is a dinosaur worth preserving. Even with security after design. delta.chat comes close to an deal world IMHO if you ignore the problem with metadata. Maybe it could integrate sth like mixes to make email a bit harder to monitor.

[aSplash0fDerp]

If we go down the list of compromised protocols, hardware and firmwares/applications in use online (not including the people), how long before those in the know conclude that the Internet is an untrusted medium for secure communications?

I don't think we'll see homing pigeons make a comeback, but using autonomous vehicle couriers for analog/digital communications (drones, but more likely sdc's) and sacrificing the convenience of real-time communications for 100% integrity is not beyond the scope of reason or wants. If a message (or payload) is intercepted, it's physically impeded and much easier to track/detect. The number of layers of security to lockdown or destroy the contents is also at the sender/receivers discretion.

Depending on how cumbersome they choose to make 8k videos, VR worlds and/or new fangled AI/ML datasets for personal/business use, we're limited to 6720 GB transfers per day over 1GB lines, so data outgrowing the Internets transfer speeds is a plausible scenario that may facilitate a use case for local and long-haul direct autonomous data couriers that will blend in with the other autonomous delivery/pickup traffic.