[Freedombox-discuss] Email on the FreedomBox Discussion

Bjarni Rúnar Einarsson bre at pagekite.net
Wed Aug 24 09:19:06 UTC 2011


On Wed, Aug 24, 2011 at 8:52 AM, John Walsh <fiftyfour at waldevin.com> wrote:
>>
>>    1. The FreedomBox reference plug will have very limited storage
>> space: e-mail accumulates unless you make people download and
>> delete from server (which means no webmail).
> I have always assumed I would have to plug a USB drive into the FBX for
> storage. This is what you have to do for TonidoPlug.

Yes, for many applications this will be necessary.  But I think this
may automatically bump SMTP e-mail to 'add-on' status instead of being
a core feature.  I could be wrong though.

>>    2. Spam has made it common practice to reject and block
>> direct SMTP communication from non-ISP-run servers.
> I have no answer to this question. Why do ISP's block home servers if all
> the spam is coming from corporate servers?

A lot of spam comes from personal devices, sent by malware which has
infected personal machines. I am not sure if this is still the case,
but for a while this was the main revenue source for the virus
underground: creating "botnets" so they could sell the ability to pump
out massive volumes of spam.

>> of 2.) provides little real value unless it does funky things
>> like automatic opportunistic GPG encryption/decryption, which
>> might be a bad idea anyway for security reasons. So
...
> I think the extra hop for encryption is a good thing, especially when my ISP
> can eavesdrop on my email. Why is encrypting my email a security risk?

If your FreedomBox is to automatically encrypt and decrypt e-mail for
you, it will need to have automatic access to your keys.  This means
if your FreedomBox is compromised, so are those keys.  This may be
inevitable anyway due to other goals, and may be a net win overall, it
all depends.  It's one of those things which needs careful
consideration.

> Now I understand the constant reference to UI :0 Personally, I chose privacy
> before "Gmail Man" UI and I guess that's why I use my ISPs server and their
> Squirrelmail webmail server. Still, I see FBX is selling privacy about UI.

The UI is probably more important to some than it is to others. :-)
For me it is important enough to keep me using GMail, I just don't
think I could handle my e-mail volume using a less helpful interface.

Also, having worked for both Google and a small ISP, I am not entirely
sure that my data is better protected by the small ISP... it really
depends on what you think your 'adversary' is. My personal
'adversaries' are a hypothetical nosy neighbor and crashed hard drives
- so a big far-away provider like Google where I am a boring needle in
a giant well-managed haystack actually feels like a better privacy bet
for me than a mom-and-pop shop here in town.

I would still rather host my own, it's just too inconvenient for me to
have gotten around to switching yet. Maybe the FreedomBox can make
that easier, maybe not. :-)

-- 
Bjarni R. Einarsson
Founder, lead developer of PageKite.

Make localhost servers visible to the world: http://pagekite.net/



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