I'm not a lawyer, but I'm currently working on getting my company HIPAA-compliant, so I know more than the average person about this.

My understanding is that there's a thing called the "conduit exception" which basically says that if data is transiently passing through a channel and it's not being looked at, it's ok. But wherever the data lands must be HIPAA-compliant.

This seems crazy to me, but that's how it works I think. For example, if you encrypt PHI and store it in AWS without signing a BAA with them, that's a HIPAA violation, even though the data is encrypted and Amazon can't see it. But if you send encrypted data through AWS without actually storing it, that's fine.

Mail is specifically mentioned as a thing that qualifies for the conduit exception. I'm not totally clear why it isn't a HIPAA violation the moment it arrives at a destination (it's not in-transit at that point, and it's potentially not in the possession of the intended recipient either), but it seems pretty well accepted that it's not.

All that to say: I think encrypted email would still require a BAA because it's being stored, not just transmitted.

It's a crime to open someone else's mail and generally speaking the post office does a pretty good job of reliable delivery. Even if an address is a bit wrong/corrupted, it can likely be delivered just from the name and the zipcode.

Email is a lot harder. The older SMTP standard sends emails unencrypted so there's a possibility of a MITM reading the email. But also addresses if you get them wrong can end up in the wrong hands. For example, if someone sends an email to cogman10, I'll get it, but if they go to cogman1O I won't get it. A lot of the nuance of how secure and when it's secure gets erased by auditors to just "email is insecure".

The post office is heavily regulated not to open your letters with severe criminal penalties if they do. An attacker also can't quietly X-ray your letter in transit to get a sneaky copy.

They also send faxes to providers as well. It's kind of ridiculous when you think of it.

Dollar bills are essentially untracked, good everywhere, secure, work no matter what. Same goes for normal mail, and it's a federal offense to tamper with it.

Nothing electronic will ever be secure, unless it is never, ever networked. Networking changes "touch physical thing" into "everyone on the planet plus their bots" can touch it.

Even if you pass harsh laws, you need to geogate network connections to only within that legal jurisdiction. Otherwise, it's pointless.

The real, true problem is anonymousness. I used to advocate for, now I'm done. The problems anonymity solve, are a gnat compared to the ones it creates.

I'm all for ipv8, but with a unique ID in the packet identifying the person directly.

I can't drive a car, own a gun, drive a boat, buy explosives, ply many trades, and 100 other things without a license. Maybe unrestricted internet access is in that category, and bad behaviour means it is revoked.

The Internet was a toy for a long time. Now it's the backbone of all commerce, industry, personal communication, with life threatening implications at times.

Play time is over.

> A “friend request” mechanism is one way of achieving this.

But then you’re left dealing with spam “friend requests”, which is still something I have to take action on, filter out, or ignore — same as spam email.

>Email supports text.

Yes it does. However, I have sent messages to more than a few people who tell me that my message is completely empty. I have my client set to send text-only, no HTML, and apparently the system on the other side drops the HTML version altogether. Something on the other end only processes the HTML part. No HTML, no message.

(I believe these are Outlook/MS based systems, but I don't know for sure. It's certainly not ALL Outlook/MS systems that do this.)

For these people I have to set my client to send HTML. It's all well and good to blame them, but I can't make them do something. They may not even be in a position to do anything. And I don't have an option to tell them "too bad, so sad".

The email situation is really quite bad if you don't conform to the Big Three. I've run my own email infrastructure for a very long time, and it's quite irritating that when we get something good (like DMARC, SPF, etc) it gets forced by the Big Three because along with that we also get things like Google toying with the requirement that you have to have AAAA MX records too.

can you post some details about the spam detector, and just your general setup? I am also an emacs-emailer, using Notmuch, but never looked too deep into the spam story

Have you put this up anywhere for others to use?

Fastmail’s spam filter is not very good.

I like per recipient emails, but I worried how I would know I authorized that sender to send to lonely chicken. The original site could have been compromised.

That's why I bought my email domain and use <domain_name>@hnrobert42.com. It helps to use a password manager.

I get a lot of convincing emails to linkedin@hnrobert42.com. As well as zynga, wework, etc.

Apple’s Hide My Email does the same thing and it’s just phenomenal.

Damn it - ublock origin did not block this promo.

The amount of bots promoting Fastmail here is insane. What the actual ...

The necessary bits to facilitate that could be added on top of the existing protocol in a manner that doesn't break existing clients. Essentially it amounts to an out of band registration of the expected sender with your own server, likely by means of a short proxy code or phrase. Couple with key exchange to facilitate an E2EE extension at the same time, while also dodging the logistical issue that would otherwise arise when a sender has multiple addresses or the sending address changes.

You can call it Secure-Email or RFC-99999

Yeah, because email as a family of protocols never developed different capabilities /s

With banks, I've found that offering to bring the matter up with the FDIC and/or fed regulators moves the balance of power to a less unfair level. "We have to use secure messages" turned into a willingness to use email in less than 6 hours last time I had an issue.

At least in part, because of your workflow, is that it's a ticketing system. Much easier to manage than having people reply to e-mails (even when you specifically state "REPLY ABOVE THIS LINE!" they are absolute cretins.)

> The gp isn't talking about spam using "secure message" as bait to open unwanted email.

No, this includes all messages from my doctor/healthcare. It's not mass spam.

Theoretically I could want to know what's in the message, but not enough to visit a website I've been logged out of again, perform multi-factor authentication, navigate to the message center and find the message and then back it up manually.