[lug] Re: Getting mail out of the Qwest/MSN mire

[John Bray]

sendmail is famously complex, but even postfix is very confusing.
There are lots of possibilities which you really need explained in a
book, but who wants to read a book about mailservers? The recipe
approach didn't help, and I only really got my setup working by trial
and error. What is needed is a GUI to guide you through the process.
They do exist, but I've never tried them.

Introducing encryption and certification would make things much worse.
Apart from ssh, that whole area is woefully explained, and you need to
read several books, and unlike some people here I suspect, I don't
want to read computer books of an evening. The government may even be
keen on introducing complicated standards to force out the small guy.
Its much easier for the NSA to subpoena the big guys, and not all
companies have the balls of Google to resist.

PGP authentication has been available for years, but a very small
fraction of people sign their mails other than with

John.

On 07/07/06, David L. Anselmi <anselmi at anselmi.us> wrote:
> Nate Duehr wrote:
> [...]
> > Every mail server that touches a message should also digitally
> > sign/stamp the message.
> >
> > All it would take is a large organization (U.S. Government, would be a
> > REALLY good one) saying, "We're going to use this Encryption technique,
> > and any mail arriving unencrypted... we're throwing away."
>
> Have you ever worked for the federal government?  I can see them doing
> just this, and just as you have they'd say "encrypt" rather than "sign".
>
> But it isn't just that mail has to be signed, the signatures have to be
> verified.  And so the mail servers have to be authenticated well.  And
> then the price of running a mail server goes up.  No big deal for Google
> but the rest of us will wind up using gmail too.  No thanks.
>
> > Companies set up VPN connections for critical business data between one
> > another as the "best practices" way of handling day to day business for
> > EVERYTHING BUT... E-mail.  Business deals big enough to affect thousands
> > of people's lives get "inked" via an un-encrypted, un-authenticated
> > e-mail every day.
> >
> > Ridiculous.
>
> Business doesn't care about security.  Some will say that rather they
> care about risk management.  My guess is they only care about beating
> the odds.  (That's not really meant to be cynical, beating the odds is
> good enough.)
>
> Dave
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