In my country we have something called BankID. BankID, it’s Sweden’s leading electronic identification system, widely used for banking, e-government services, and secure logins. So I use it to login to the bank, check my taxes, hospital status, bookings etc. Basically the message itself is already on their website and never leaves them.
Buying something? Login to the website and see your order.
Delivery of something you bought and want to see when the packet arrives? You have an smartphone app for that. Like login to company app and view. You even get push notifications.
And for those people who actually get a message from a person instead of a company. You have chat, like Microsoft Teams, Slack, Discord etc. You even can have voice and video conference with the other person.
Chat is instant messaging and is not slow compared to email.
Account registration? Make use of OpenID. Or even better passkeys.
Bonus: In my country we have Kivra - government post. Any company can get it and send the normal letter in a digital format - basically the none printed version of the letter so a PDF.
Emails controlled by the government? No, never. Emails are a decentralized protocol and there is no point what so ever to have the government controlling it.
Look, emails are not safe, not encrypted. See all emails as public knowledge. If I go to their website and login to view sensitive information about me, then it is safer.
Apps are optional.
If you are talking about Kivra then there are private companies alternatives as well. You as a user pick and choose. Personally I dont use it as I get like one letter per year and would forget to login to it. There are better alternatives for normal letters as well.
Email is quite a bit safer than people think, especially if you host your own. Typically it is encrypted from point to point, so if a company emails me it goes through their internal system to their gateway, is encrypted using SSL and transmitted directly to my server where it’s stored until I connect over an SSL encrypted link to download my mail
Even an ISP will have almost everything encrypted as it really is the default now
There’s practically no chance for a man in the middle attack
I do accept unencrypted mail but nothing arrives on port 25 (unencrypted email) except scam attempts to get spam forwarded (which are denied)
Many do not run their own email server. It is just too hard. Companies choose Microsoft or Gmail to host email as it is cheap for them or included in something like office 365. Google have admitted that they read users’ email in search for custom advertisement. I would assume the same is true for Microsoft. On the inside we just have to trust them that they don’t make too many copies to foreign power or abuse it in any other way.
On the private side(not companies), Gmail really dominate. Very many don’t even know what selfhosting is and even fewer have the know-how and actually do it for email. People just don’t want that burden of selfhosting, maintenance, work. I would love the world to get more decentralized, use peer to peer, but today everything is more centralized than ever before.
Email should be E2EE, but that is never going to happen without the big players on that train - they just have too huge market share and that would go against their profitability.
I believe emails should not be used. There are or should be better alternatives. Account creation should be handled by passkeys.
Email is legacy. Insecure and content is just a webpage…
What is your alternative idea that isn’t just improved email?
In my country we have something called BankID. BankID, it’s Sweden’s leading electronic identification system, widely used for banking, e-government services, and secure logins. So I use it to login to the bank, check my taxes, hospital status, bookings etc. Basically the message itself is already on their website and never leaves them.
Subscriptions? We have RSS.
Buying something? Login to the website and see your order.
Delivery of something you bought and want to see when the packet arrives? You have an smartphone app for that. Like login to company app and view. You even get push notifications.
And for those people who actually get a message from a person instead of a company. You have chat, like Microsoft Teams, Slack, Discord etc. You even can have voice and video conference with the other person. Chat is instant messaging and is not slow compared to email.
Account registration? Make use of OpenID. Or even better passkeys.
Bonus: In my country we have Kivra - government post. Any company can get it and send the normal letter in a digital format - basically the none printed version of the letter so a PDF.
You really want emails replaced by a thousand applications OR emails controlled by the government?
Emails controlled by the government? No, never. Emails are a decentralized protocol and there is no point what so ever to have the government controlling it. Look, emails are not safe, not encrypted. See all emails as public knowledge. If I go to their website and login to view sensitive information about me, then it is safer. Apps are optional.
If you are talking about Kivra then there are private companies alternatives as well. You as a user pick and choose. Personally I dont use it as I get like one letter per year and would forget to login to it. There are better alternatives for normal letters as well.
Email is quite a bit safer than people think, especially if you host your own. Typically it is encrypted from point to point, so if a company emails me it goes through their internal system to their gateway, is encrypted using SSL and transmitted directly to my server where it’s stored until I connect over an SSL encrypted link to download my mail
Even an ISP will have almost everything encrypted as it really is the default now
There’s practically no chance for a man in the middle attack
I do accept unencrypted mail but nothing arrives on port 25 (unencrypted email) except scam attempts to get spam forwarded (which are denied)
Many do not run their own email server. It is just too hard. Companies choose Microsoft or Gmail to host email as it is cheap for them or included in something like office 365. Google have admitted that they read users’ email in search for custom advertisement. I would assume the same is true for Microsoft. On the inside we just have to trust them that they don’t make too many copies to foreign power or abuse it in any other way.
On the private side(not companies), Gmail really dominate. Very many don’t even know what selfhosting is and even fewer have the know-how and actually do it for email. People just don’t want that burden of selfhosting, maintenance, work. I would love the world to get more decentralized, use peer to peer, but today everything is more centralized than ever before.
Email should be E2EE, but that is never going to happen without the big players on that train - they just have too huge market share and that would go against their profitability.