| This has really got me thinking about an architecture I had not really considered before so forgive the obvious in this - it's partly aide memoire and partly a contribution to OP - goals of the "new email" should presumably be to reduce the ability of state actors and major comms providers to collect sufficient metadata to conduct mass surveillance for tyranny or profit. as such we can try either - Vast citizen owned mesh networks (ie every smartphone is a ISP) - Anonymity over traditional large ISPs / backbones Anonymity is hard. We could encrypt entire message and then round robin decrypt each incoming message, this would cripple all metadata apart from the TO: field and mean any listener would need to own most entry points to catch the first uptake. It seems difficult - webs of trust, guessing the encryption key. Add in other constraints - all messages in transit and at rest are encrypted - gmail becomes no more than S3 - and we see the end of free email, and weirdly a return to POP3 as the client must store all my mail. If this does exist however, why restrict it to emails - every message format seems similar - MQ and Facebook can all go this way. Mesh networks have even greater barriers to uptake ... |