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Comment by johnea | Hacker News Reader

email still rules! In every way described in the article. The fact that socially, one is "laughable" is really a laugh at the tech illiterate.

A good email client and server, offering instantaneous message transfer and notification is infinitely more secure and functional than any "messaging" "app". A tech savvy person can easily run their own mail server, or migrate their history from one vendor to another. Try that with your signal history...

Of course, it's just not socially acceptable to admit the boomers were right on this one...

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Email falls at the very first hurdle presented in the article (“No privacy whatsoever” applies just as well to email as it does to SMS).

"No privacy whatsoever" is a bit of an stretch of an argument to make, specially when talking to the general public. You have way more privacy when sending a plain text SMS or an email than when sending a physical letter with a wax seal, and most people would argue that the latter is "private" for some definition of the word.

I would even bet that any email leaks that most users would be afraid of are going to be caused by, in this order:

A) The intended email recipient leaking it

B) The email recipient/sender storing a copy of the email at rest (likely unencrypted, even if it was sent encrypted in transit).

C) An official email archiving policy from either the recipient or the sender's organization

And only at at the very bottom of the list "one of the intermediate mail relays being compromised and leaking the email in transit".

The thing with email is it's only encrypted (even in transit) sometimes. So it kinda has the same issue as iMessage. If you're a Gmail user using Gmail's web app to email another Gmail user, you get encryption in transit (and it sounds like you might be able to implement E2EE as well). But if you email dave@somerandomemailserver.com, you won't know until you send the message whether it's encrypted.

As for envelopes and wax seals--it's an interesting question. It requires a lot less technical knowledge for someone to open that envelope than to spy on messaging traffic. On the other hand, a lot more people have access to the messaging traffic and can bring scripts to bear on it at scale.

> On the other hand, a lot more people have access to the messaging traffic and can bring scripts to bear on it at scale.

Actually, I disagree here.

I get what you're saying but the UI and UX of email is a wreck and a half even with a good client.

And simple-but-powerful applications like messaging should appeal to the lowest common denominator if they want to be effective and usable.

good news! the delta chat application is available for PC, Mac, Android, iphone and gives you signal-style clients but powered by (encrypted if you want) email messages.

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