Re:Lavabit's Dark Mail Initiative
by Dylan16807 on Tuesday November 05, 2013 @06:00AM
(#6674419)
>If you need the server to be able to text search through your mail archive (and I do that a _lot_ on my phone), you need to "trust" the server with your clear text.
How many megabytes of body text are you searching through? Is your phone actually incapable of doing the search in milliseconds?
My inbox currently contains 5800 e-mails and takes ~500mb of disk space. Doing a full text search takes a bit, even on a laptop.
Re:Lavabit's Dark Mail Initiative
by Dylan16807 on Tuesday November 05, 2013 @12:06PM
(#6676251)
Disk space doesn't matter. That's going to be mostly extra headers and formatting and attachments. I can't find many sources for the number of words in an email, but what I did find suggests about 50. Let's assume that's an entire order of magnitude off, and you have 500 words * 5800 emails. That's 17MB. A laptop or a phone can easily cache that much data and search it in a tenth of a second. All you have to do is filter out the junk beforehand instead of repeating the work every time you search.
I have a million emails occupying 20GB, and receive several hundred per day. I search my mail archive using xapian (via notmuch) on my laptop, but such solutions are less practical for phones and even some desktop users expect IMAP search to work. Indexing is definitely a problem if you want the server's store to be encrypted.
You do not need the full text for search. You can hash every word and search hashes.
Re:Lavabit's Dark Mail Initiative
by Dylan16807 on Tuesday November 05, 2013 @12:13PM
(#6676297)
That sounds completely insecure.
If you need the server to be able to text search through your mail archive (and I do that a _lot_ on my phone), you need to "trust" the server with your clear text.
If you don't want to run and secure your own server - you need to choose what level of compromise you're prepared to accept.
My current project is a mail server on a RaspberryPi, hidden behind my home NAT gateway and firewall, that opens reverse ssh tunnels for ports 25 and 465 to inexpensive VPSes configured to not log anything - with IMAP (and webmail) access limited to my local network (and to my phone and iPad via vpn). It uses Vagrant and Ansible to provision and configure VPSes on the fly, and DNS hosting with APIs that Ansible can update MX records for as my receiving mail server moves around different VPS vendors in different jurisdictions.