Sealgram

It's 2015. Universal surveillance is on the news for years already, and each day people discovers yet another country that spies on every person they can get to, steals secrets for their local corporations, and shares all that data with every other country. Once or twice a year we get news of hackers stealing data from some big corporation, and people losing money because of messages they thought were from their bank don't even make the news anymore. Yet, we all just keep using the completely public and insecure email.

There are even tools for email security around, there are PGP, and S/MIME, but almost nobody uses them. And for good reason because they are incredibly hard to use. Yet, nobody seems to be creating anything that could work.

That's why I've started asking myself how one could make email security and privacy so easy to use that everybody could just use it, without even thinking about it. The answer I got was that one just couldn't do it with email itself... but with a few backward compatible extensions I'd get an incredibly cool protocol, with several improvements for all kinds of things, like:

• Privacy and security
• Group communication
• Collaborative edition and review of files
• Data, files and tasks organization

And much, much else. It's a pretty fundamental change with enough applications that'll take a long time to discover them all. If it's successful enough, I don't even expect to be the first to discover most of them. It is so awesome an idea that I simply can't stand not building it.

And phew! I decided that I'd stop everything and announce it when I got a (traditional) mail server running [1], and so it is. Announcement made. It was vague, very vague, but that's because I haven't wrote any application for it yet. I'll get more specific later, and will stop to write again here when I get NFS replaced by email at my home network, or earlier if I can. See you then.