💾 Archived View for tilde.team › ~smokey › logs › 2022-07-14-email.gmi captured on 2023-04-26 at 13:56:46. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2022-07-16)
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I have never really used email for more than making online accounts and work related stuff. Skype,,Discord, Facebook, text and calls were the vehicles of my communication for many years. This year I have been making a concious effort to go back to the humble email to talk to people.
Email is kind of like a digital post card to me. Theres something about checking your inbox expecting nothing or spam, only to find a nice hand crafted message waiting for you. A proper title leading up to some paragraphs, usually ended by a nice signature.
Compare that to conventional messages on SMS, fb, discord, or even XMPP clients, where its just blurbs of words being thrown your way. No formal structure. Many clients broadcast "seen/read" and "typing..." signals which personally puts some pressure on me for whatever reason.
I like sending emails. They take some time to make and makes you think about want you want to say to people. If you loose your steam you can save a draft for later instead of feeling like a jackass for broadcasting "typing..." for 10 minutes and send nothing.
Most important;y. they feel personal and special to recieve. Something rare in the modern digital age. If you want to get on someones good side, dont @ them on [social media], send em a email. Just getting to know community members through sending them little emails letting them know their things were seen by another real person.
Some tildes challenge Googles own usefulness. Most offer at the very least a free email service if not a full suite of open source cloud services. Stuff like nextcloud and open source document writers. tilde.team offers enough services and cloud storage for me to seriously consider burning my google account for good.
But for the discussion today, tildes almost universally offer No fuss no muss email thats accesible from the terminal, or from the web, or from your client of choice.
Its gotten to the point I trust some privacy/foss/unix IT guy halfway around the world and their box with my data more than I trust a mega-corp. If I want to know the specifics of how my data is stored and on what machine I can email @ben or reach them in IRC.
Google throws a hissy fit when I tried to use a FOSS mail client, tutanota straight up won't let you use any other client but theirs. I don't know about posteo but Im not paying for an email service when tildes are good enough.
Also anyone who gives a rats ass about privacy/ data security will use GPG or OMEMO before their message or file touches a server.
The only way to really know whats up with your data is to host your own services on your own box. Ben could theoretically lie to me and I would never know unless I got physical acsess to the box and had the know-how to understand the IMAP server process. As the email service cock.li so aptly puts it:
How can I trust you?
You can't. Cock.li doesn't parse your E-mail to provide you with targeted ads, nor does cock.li read E-mail contents unless it's for a legal court order. However, it is 100% possible for me to read E-mail, and IMAP/SMTP doesn't provide user-side/client-side encryption, so you're just going to have to take my word for it.
Any encryption implementation would still technically allow me to read E-mail, too. This was true for Lavabit as well -- while your E-mail was stored encrypted (only if you were a paid member, which most people forget), E-mail could still technically be intercepted while being received / sent (SMTP), or while being read by your mail client (IMAP). For privacy, we recommend encrypting your E-mails using PGP using a mail client add-on like Enigmail, or downloading your mail locally with POP and regularly deleting your mail from our server.
Also, there's this quote from /g/:
Administering a mail host is sort of like being a nurse; there's a brief period at the start when the thought of seeing people's privates might be vaguely titillating in a theoretical sense, but that sort of thing doesn't last long when it's up against the daily reality of shit, piss, blood, and vomit.
Now that I think about it, administering a mail host is exactly like being a nurse, only people die slightly less often.
So either get the technical knowledge to run your own server or accept the risk of trust. I am not up to maintaining my own servers at the moment so I accept the risk of putting my data in another persons hands.
Email, IRC, and XMPP are great things that more people need to learn to use. I was reluctant to use email for so long, now I cant wait to add people to my contact book and shoot them a how-do-you-do. On gemini there are many capsules with reply/guestbook CGI implemented. Screw that!