[146488] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: [Cryptography] Functional specification for email client?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Ray Dillinger)
Fri Aug 30 19:57:00 2013
X-Original-To: cryptography@metzdowd.com
Date: Fri, 30 Aug 2013 16:50:44 -0700
From: Ray Dillinger <bear@sonic.net>
To: Jonathan Thornburg <jthorn@astro.indiana.edu>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.BSO.2.00.1308301651110.248@cobalt.astro.indiana.edu>
Cc: cryptography@metzdowd.com
Errors-To: cryptography-bounces+crypto.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@metzdowd.com
On 08/30/2013 01:52 PM, Jonathan Thornburg wrote:
> On Fri, 30 Aug 2013, Ray Dillinger wrote:
>> 3. When an email user gets an email, s/he is absolutely sure that it comes
>> from the person who holds the email address listed in its "from" line.
>> S/he may or may not have any clue who that person is. S/he is also
>> sure that no one else has seen the contents of the email.
>
> This probably needs amending to deal with messages addressed to multiple
> recipients (either cc:, bcc:, or simply multiple to: addresses).
>
Right.
More generally, I was hoping for feedback as to whether this is a design
useful to and usable by ordinary people.
It's fairly straightforwardly implementable as a fully distributed system,
given the notion that "routing information" includes public key. The only
slightly tricky issue is maintaining the coherence of the per-domain
routing databases among mutually suspicious clients, and there are existing
techniques for that.
It's also compatible with current standards for email payloads, so existing
infrastructure can easily be adapted; in the protocol stack, it looks like
any other MTA.
It can also fairly easily gateway to SMTP, but is not dependent on it.
Bear
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