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Comment by Steuard | Hacker News Reader

I've read chunks of the site, but I'm still not entirely clear on what advantage this scheme has over RSA encryption of standard SMTP mail (via PGP/MIME on the local machine, say).

Is the main advantage that a given identity isn't tied to a specific server here? Is that a big enough gain to justify an entirely new protocol and ecosystem of clients? I assume I'm missing some other benefits.

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P2P reduces points of failure. Sure, you can encrypt email to your heart's content, but can you trust the server you dropped it with to deliver it? "Why would anyone want to prevent you emailing people?" you ask. Lots of reasons, the biggest of which seems to me to be that if you can't trust encrypted mail to arrive, perhaps you'll abandon it.

SMTP leaks metadata.

How does this p2p approach avoid that?

Only if the servers aren't using SMTPS. Which in practice many don't but there really is no reason why that cannot be changed.

If yourserver.com is connecting to friendsserver.com on port 25... there is some metadata. I mean if three-letter-agencies are monitoring the internet they'll figure out what just happened.

You still need a way to exchange the RSA encryption keys with each sender and receiver.

Isn't that still an issue for this new protocol? My skim through the site gave me the impression that this system essentially addresses messages to a specific RSA signing identity. I can just as easily choose to do that over SMTP, right? (I'm imagining sending to an SMTP email address encoded in the public signing key.)

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