Why the poor uptake of encrypted email?

James A. Donald jamesd at echeque.com
Wed Dec 17 21:00:35 EST 2008


Nicolas Williams wrote:
 > Providing a suitable e-mail security solution for the
 > masses strikes me as more important than providing
 > anonymity to the few people who want or need it.  Not
 > that you can't have both, unless you want everyone to
 > use PGP or S/MIME as a way to hide anonymized traffic
 > from non-anonymized traffic.

If email goes away - as I hope and expect it will - we
will need a new store and forward solution to support
anonymity.

A store and forward system is a system without end to
end real time round trips.  Obviously end to end real
time round trips prevent anonymity.

A system built on top of a best effort unreliable
messaging system requires some round tripping, which
does not make anonymity impossible, but does make it
tricky.  Email's architecture is very nice for
supporting anonymity.

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