index prev next --- Petmail --- http://petmail.lothar.com/ --- Brian Warner --- CodeCon2004 ---
While we're replacing the MUA, we can improve the mail system in other ways.
We know that spammers will eventually forge everything, so per-sender
policies require cryptographic signatures. So we have public keys, so we can
encrypt and sign everything. We don't make any claims about real-world
identity of the sender, just that it was signed by the same person you
granted permission to earlier, so we aren't maknig it any harder to be
anonymous or pseudonymous.
Since we have to publish a public key and a receiving policy for everybody,
we can put other information into that record, and then decouple addressing
and routing from identity. Instead of an email address defining your
identity, it is merely a pointer to an identity, one which can have multiple
addresses, or none at all. The agent knows how to contact everyone in your
address book, so if you change anything (like adding or removing an address),
it can update them all.
SMTP bounces are basically unusable: they're hard to parse, or correlate to
outbound messages, and they've been heavily abused by spammers. We should
obey the end-to-end principle and let the agents be responsible for getting
the message through an unreliable network, rather than the intermediate
nodes.
[trans] Now I'm going to go over the design of the Petmail system.
[deb-runthrough hit here at T+15min]