You can say the exact same thing about all secure messaging, which, after all, has the essential function of keeping documents out of the hands of third parties, including activists and historians. If DKIM upsets you, how do you get your head around disappearing messages?

>how do you get your head around disappearing messages?

I get my head around them by thinking they are bad? As in, not good. An undesirable property.

I mean, I guess you'd have to think that, to think that ensuring deniable emails is "shameful", as this thread suggests. I just wonder what the boundary of that thinking is. Message encryption also impedes activists!

> how do you get your head around disappearing messages?

I mean I try to publish most of my interesting email conversations on the web, because every time you have a good email conversation that isn't public it's like taking a $100 bill and lighting it on fire. So I wouldn't ever personally use disappearing messages.

Literally the first rule of email is that if you wouldn't want it on the front page of the NYT then you shouldn't send it. The first national scandal involving email was Iran Contra in 1986. People should know by now not to put anything into an email that they wouldn't be comfortable with the entire world knowing. And while privacy is hugely important to individuals and essential for a healthy society, to me rotating DKIM keys feels like it's incentivizing people to use email incorrectly.

Then why don't we design such a system first with a higher level of guarantee first and inform users that this the goal.

We did, it's called email. The phrase "like a postcard" is how email has been described for decades -- by our school systems and the media when educating the general public, in corporate training, and in the court system.

This is an absurd claim.

There is not a popular email system in existence that says

"To: [email protected] CC: Everyone [NON-EDITABLE]"

Quite the opposite is true. Gmail, for example, says "Google.com Mail protects your message during delivery As you add people to this message, this icon will let you know your message is secure."

Do you mistrust the unsigned emails from 10+ years ago because they were sent prior to DKIM?

As for authenticity, you could contact him, or his correspondents?

> Do you mistrust the unsigned emails from 10+ years ago because they were sent prior to DKIM?

Yes.

> As for authenticity, you could contact him, or his correspondents?

Correspondents aren't necessarily going to tell the truth about the authenticity of their own email. And that's assuming they're alive, reachable, and willing to talk, all of which may not be the case now and will be the case with 100% certainty in the future.

That just proves that he did send the mails he published. But since he did not put the mails on a block chain, we'll never know whether he was e.g. exchanging steamy e-mails with Grace Hopper or arranging weed deals with E.W. Dijkstra (or vice versa) on the side and decided to omit them from his published correspondence >:-)