[ih] secure email was The Internet Plan; was: Ken Olsen's impact on the Internet

[James Galvin]

-- On February 16, 2011 9:10:59 PM -0500 Bernie Cosell 
<bernie at fantasyfarm.com> wrote regarding Re: [ih] secure email was  The 
Internet Plan;	was: Ken Olsen's impact on the Internet --

> On 16 Feb 2011 at 19:52, James Galvin wrote:
>
> > -- On February 16, 2011 6:06:36 PM -0500 Bernie Cosell
> > <bernie at fantasyfarm.com> wrote regarding [ih] secure email was  The
> > Internet Plan;	was: Ken Olsen's impact on the Internet --
> >
> > As a concept, change an email address to a domain name by replacing
> > the  "@" with a ".".  Then lookup the public key for that user.
> > For that  matter, lookup the certificate for that user, which could
> > even be  self-signed.
>
> you're suggesting that, for example, that when you signed up for the
> IH  mailing list and decided to use
> "galvin+internet-history at elistx.com" as  your email address for it,
> rather than just typing that in and starting  to use it you'd first
> have to go to some central registry somewhere and  "register" that
> address and have it get its own keyset, and then  appropriately enter
> its private key into every email client you'll ever  use [else you
> can't properly _generate_ an email from
> "galvin+internet-history at elistx.com", yes?].  Is this about how it'd
> work?   Seems a bit cumbersome, but I guess it'd prevent anyone from
> forging email that'd look like it came from you.

"Cumbersome" is just a matter of programming, right?  :-)

What you propose is one way it could work.  I've got others (yes more 
than one), but this is not the appropriate forum in which to discuss 
email futures.

I will say that we should work to protect the infrastructure first, 
MTA-MTA communication.  We now have two important and useful pieces: 
DKIM and DNSSEC.  We could accomplish a lot if we could bring them 
together.

Jim