Re: The introduction problem, was Thinking outside the box

On 19 Mar 2013, at 22:35, John Levine <[email protected]> wrote:

> In article <[email protected]>, Paul Smith  <[email protected]> wrote:
>> On 19/03/2013 18:42, John Levine wrote:
>>>> I don't want 'random' people to email me. In fact I don't know anyone
>>>> who wants random people to email them.
>>> Now you do.  I definitely want it to be possible for people who I
>>> don't already know to email me.  That's where I get most of my work.
>>> I also get occasional mail from old high school friends and the like.
>> 
>> But the thing is that you have to have told them your email address!
> 
> It's not hard to find, it's on my web site.

Which is *exactly* the point.

They are not 'random' senders (they have put non-negligible effort in to find you), and you have just solved 'the introduction problem'. If you can put your email address on a web site, you can put a temporary 'key' there as well, or a temporary 'tagged email address' or whatever, or even a PGP key (if it was made easy for the sender to import that from a web site and people expected to need it).

The 'introduction problem' exists for existing email, and has already been solved. Just use the same schemes for anything else needed for someone to send me mail.

A reason it's hard for PGP and S/MIME is because even though I can put my public key on a website, it's not easy for an average user to import it from there (and is not easy to use non-electronic media to give that sort of key either). Thus use a simpler key - even though it's less secure, it'll be more usable.



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