[HN Gopher] Email immutability matters more in a world with AI
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       Email immutability matters more in a world with AI
        
       Author : brongondwana
       Score  : 138 points
       Date   : 2025-10-02 18:00 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.fastmail.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.fastmail.com)
        
       | blibble wrote:
       | > The world is changing, and we need to adapt and understand it.
       | 
       | fastmail: read my lips: I pay you because you offer a traditional
       | email service
       | 
       | if you add a single AI feature I will return to self hosting
        
         | toomuchtodo wrote:
         | +1 as a fastmail family account customer.
        
           | mbesto wrote:
           | Same here. Fastmail customer for slowly peeling myself away
           | from gmail. Just keep giving me reliable email service and
           | I'll pay you.
        
           | barbazoo wrote:
           | Is there such a thing as a family account?
           | 
           | > Add a user to your billing plan to give someone their own
           | Fastmail Inbox and login. Build your team, be it work or
           | family, and share calendars, contacts and more. Give users
           | extra addresses for free
           | 
           | The way my UX works is I can add users but they always have
           | to have their own paid plan. Makes sense for heavy email
           | users but not so much for my partner or our kids. I was
           | hoping there was a 5 accounts for the price of 3 thing like
           | Spotify et al do.
        
             | spott wrote:
             | They have a "family" plan on their pricing page. "For up to
             | six in a family. Private, secure email for everyone."
        
         | withinboredom wrote:
         | And all these services doubling or even trippeling their price
         | to offer the same thing ... but with AI! I'd happily pay
         | fastmail double the price, without the AI.
        
           | gdulli wrote:
           | Heard, but let's not give them ideas.
        
           | jimbo808 wrote:
           | I genuinely tried to embrace them, but I have found these AI
           | "enhancements" to be utterly useless. Very rare that they can
           | answer the question I'm having about the product. I'm not
           | sure what the norms are for how these assistants are trained
           | or fine tuned for the specific products they're being offered
           | in, but it seems that they're pretty bad. They don't seem to
           | know anything about the product you're using them in.
        
             | neutronicus wrote:
             | We ship an AI assistant with our product.
             | 
             | I am attempting to dogfood it, as I am pretty close to the
             | target audience. I, a dev, get a bug report "X doesn't
             | work". I have never heard of "X". Ask the AI assistant
             | instead of Googling it or asking on Slack.
             | 
             | Google's AI overview is basically always better (and
             | delivered sooner) than our own proprietary AI assistant.
        
         | daveguy wrote:
         | The entire article is about protecting against AI, and their
         | internal policy on AI use. No new features mentioned.
        
           | blibble wrote:
           | it doesn't hurt to dispel the illusion that "existing product
           | plus AI equals more money"
        
         | 28304283409234 wrote:
         | Same. Family account. Stay simple.
        
         | dlcarrier wrote:
         | Self hosting? I can't even visit simple static web pages
         | without Cloudflare blocking me because my web browser isn't
         | sufficiently trackable. There's no way they're letting self-
         | hosted email messages get through.
        
           | drnick1 wrote:
           | This is a myth. I self-host email and don't have
           | deliverability issues. What matters is domain age, IP, and
           | compliance with DKIM/DMARC.
        
             | DamonHD wrote:
             | Same here. Self hosting (STMP, DNS, etc) for ~30Y.
        
             | gjgtcbkj wrote:
             | Prove it.
        
               | drnick1 wrote:
               | What is there to prove? You can register your own domain
               | (avoid exotic TLDs), wait a few months to build trust,
               | and use an email setup script like Luke Smith's to set up
               | Postfix/Dovecot.
               | 
               | Before you start sending email, use mail-tester.com to
               | check that DKIM is correctly set up and that your IP is
               | not blacklisted.
        
             | Cu3PO42 wrote:
             | Is it? Last time I tried to self-host my email I did. I had
             | DKIM, DMARC and SPF set up correctly as verified by
             | multiple sites, but I couldnt't get reliable delivery to
             | any Microsoft-hopsted mailboxes. Every other provider I
             | tested was perfectly happy with my mail, unfortunately MS
             | is too big a provider to ignore them.
             | 
             | > What matters is domain age, IP, and compliance with
             | DKIM/DMARC.
             | 
             | Maybe it was my IP, but I cycled a few with my hosting
             | provider and none of them made a difference. If I am unable
             | to reliable obtain a 'trusted' IP, what good does it do?
             | 
             | I switched to hosted email and all my delivery issues were
             | gone.
        
               | abdullahkhalids wrote:
               | There are tools that can check if your IP is on a
               | blacklist [1].
               | 
               | Also, my experience with self-hosting email is that if
               | you get people to email you first from their domain, and
               | you reply to them, then you are not going to be blocked.
               | Of course, this won't work if you send a lot of cold
               | emails.
               | 
               | [1] https://mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx
        
               | renewiltord wrote:
               | Use an email warming service or warm it yourself
        
               | witrak wrote:
               | >> What matters is domain age, IP, and compliance with
               | DKIM/DMARC.
               | 
               | >Maybe it was my IP, but I cycled a few with my hosting
               | provider and none of them made a difference. If I am
               | unable to reliable obtain a 'trusted' IP, what good does
               | it do?
               | 
               | That's true. I have a Class C IP range and a domain
               | registered for 30 years and yet Gmail still started
               | ignoring my email server a couple of years ago...
        
           | Flere-Imsaho wrote:
           | Could you expand on this?
           | 
           | I use everything I can to block trackers, spy ware, etc and
           | have never been "Cloudflare blocked".
        
         | Mizza wrote:
         | Came here to say this. I use fastmail am quite happy with it
         | because I just want a reliable inbox and nothing else. Just
         | keep it running and don't touch anything else.
        
         | Gigachad wrote:
         | Tbh I do wish Fastmail would add some kind of automatic email
         | classification like Gmail added many years ago to filter the
         | newsletters out of the important email.
        
         | tamimio wrote:
         | Seriously, I just need a no BS email, if I see a single bubble
         | with some assistance im bailing out immediately.
        
         | julianlam wrote:
         | This is a surprisingly aggressive reaction after reading a blog
         | post asserting that said company will NOT go in that direction.
        
       | mlhpdx wrote:
       | Interesting take. I have decades worth of email archived, so it
       | does ring true for me at least. I doubt anything in there is more
       | interesting to Big Brother but who knows?
        
         | Night_Thastus wrote:
         | Interesting to federal government, not likely. Interesting to
         | marketers and scammers, _absolutely_.
        
       | Night_Thastus wrote:
       | "An email is your copy, and the sender can't revise it later."
       | 
       | Sort of. They can't change plain text, but modern emails often
       | include vast swaths of remote content. When you open the message,
       | it retrieves the relevant assets directly from whoever sent the
       | email. That remote content is _not permanently stored_. It 's
       | cached for a bit and will not be re-used if the email is opened
       | months or years later.
       | 
       | If those assets disappear or are changed, there's very little any
       | email provider can do about that.
        
         | toomuchtodo wrote:
         | The provider could create a snapshot at receive and/or open
         | (fetching these potentially mutable asset dependencies within a
         | message), similar to what https://github.com/karakeep-
         | app/karakeep and https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFile
         | do with url bookmarks, and attach it (or otherwise associate
         | it) to the message. Optional of course.
         | 
         | The benefit of this is senders couldn't treat it as a read
         | receipt, because the provider can state "Our infra performs
         | this operation for the user for immutability purposes" similar
         | to other email operations that proxy these requests for privacy
         | purposes.
        
         | kenferry wrote:
         | Modern marketing emails, yes... not emails written as
         | correspondence. I don't think this post is talking about
         | marketing emails.
        
         | mikepurvis wrote:
         | I don't think that's really the case, is it? At least, not in
         | any formally-specified way. Modern email clients will extract
         | metadata for things like airline reservations, shipping
         | trackers, ICS calendar invites, etc, and give you live tiles
         | specific to that time-sensitive info, but it's very clearly
         | supplementary and at least in GMail none of it is pretending to
         | be part of the message itself.
        
           | IanCal wrote:
           | Images are the clear thing that is typically remote -
           | sometimes to the point of an email that's entirely just an
           | image, or rather a link to an image.
        
             | mikepurvis wrote:
             | Doesn't GMail pre-fetch those images and then cache them
             | for the duration of the email being in your inbox, so as to
             | defeat tracker dots, read receipts, etc?
        
           | ian-g wrote:
           | Narvar's tracking emails are mostly-image
           | 
           | And on the one hand, it's cool as hell to see your email
           | update itself to show tracking progress
           | 
           | On the other hand, just send me a new email. It's fine, I
           | promise.
        
         | acdha wrote:
         | If this was correct, you wouldn't be able to read those
         | messages with remote content loading disabled or when in
         | airplane mode. It's pretty uncommon for me to get messages
         | where that's the case, and those are almost always marketing
         | spam so, as they say, nothing of value is lost.
         | 
         | Apple's private loading feature also shows how that could be
         | fixed: the mail server can retrieve the referenced content once
         | and save it so you'd always know what was served at the time
         | the message was sent.
        
         | bbarnett wrote:
         | This isn't entirely true. While HTML email sometimes does have
         | html tags in it, and can remotely download embedded images, it
         | doesn't necessarily retrieve the asset from the person who sent
         | it.
         | 
         | It could be anywhere, which is another knock against HTML
         | email.
         | 
         | Which is why text only email is still king, and used in a lot
         | of places still.
        
         | munk-a wrote:
         | When it's a silly marketing email - sure. But you'd be
         | surprised how hard you need to work as a sender to ensure that
         | your content will render correctly if your business is actually
         | to deliver information via email. Remote content is ignored by
         | default by almost all modern email clients (since developers
         | got sneaky and started using it for tracking) so a good email
         | with rich content is usually embedding all that content into a
         | multi-part email and leveraging static styling rules to provide
         | as much formatting as possible.
        
           | novemp wrote:
           | You don't have to work hard at all if you send plain text.
        
             | munk-a wrote:
             | I'm not certain if it still exists this way since I've been
             | removed from the actual email templates for a while - but
             | when I originally wrote them for my company they were
             | multi-format supporting with the plaintext chunk as the
             | lead portion - after that came the fancy HTML version with
             | all the bells and whistles that the business required.
             | 
             | Did anyone ever read the plaintext version of the email
             | outside our company? Probably not - but it was super useful
             | for testing that the content was correct by dumping the
             | full message contents to console.
             | 
             | Would I have been applauded for only providing customers
             | with a plain text email? Nah, you need a really niche
             | audience to appreciate that - I love that audience, but
             | that audience isn't our customer base unfortunately.
             | 
             | The actual mechanics of email formatting are quite simple
             | (it basically hasn't changed at all in 50+ years) so it can
             | be quite straightforward - it just gets difficult when you
             | try and get fancy.
        
         | matsemann wrote:
         | Gmail keeps editing mails. They have a concept of "dynamic
         | emails" people can send now. Like if you get a mail
         | notification about something in Docs, they will keep updating
         | the mail in your inbox together with modified / added comments
         | in the document.
         | 
         | Absolutely bonkers.
         | 
         | "Because of the dynamic nature of AMP messages, the content
         | displayed in Gmail messages can change as time passes."
         | https://support.google.com/a/answer/9709409?hl=en
        
           | jacquesm wrote:
           | Great for audits. And gmail ate my homework...
        
           | thewebguyd wrote:
           | Microsoft has this now too with Loop components. If you put
           | any text content around it that doesn't change, but the
           | "Loop" component is a live doc and will update on the email
           | client's end of the remote doc changes.
        
           | freedomben wrote:
           | Jesus, I had no idea :-(
        
       | lupire wrote:
       | This is just an ad.
        
       | azhenley wrote:
       | So should I stop building my AI-first email client?
        
         | IncreasePosts wrote:
         | The article says they're fine if you want to use AI but they're
         | not going to foist it upon you
        
       | cypherpunks01 wrote:
       | Your own emails are immutable, if you trust nobody's modified
       | your copy.
       | 
       | But proving to others that an email hasn't been modified is a
       | more difficult task. As I understand it, you'd need to retain
       | DKIM keys for the signing server, to check that historical DKIM
       | signatures verify correctly and the old message was not forged or
       | altered.
       | 
       | Are DKIM signing keys issued in some kind of Certificate
       | Transparency log, where you can verify whether a particular DKIM
       | key existed for a particular domain in the past, in order to do
       | this in general?
        
         | Alex3917 wrote:
         | There is at least one service that scrapes and archives the
         | DKIM keys of popular websites.
        
         | acdha wrote:
         | They at least were not historically archived. This came up
         | during the Hunter Biden laptop investigation where people were
         | able to verify some of the messages only because the Gmail key
         | was archived in many places because that service is so popular.
         | I'm not aware of anyone making a comprehensive archive but I'd
         | be unsurprised if someone did based on news like that.
         | 
         | https://github.com/robertdavidgraham/hunter-dkim#but-gmails-...
         | 
         | EDIT: this one exists but is incomplete:
         | https://archive.prove.email/about
        
         | bananapub wrote:
         | people are trying to do the opposite - publish DKIM private
         | keys regularly so everyone knows that old DKIM signatures can
         | be forged, so that they can't be used against you.
        
       | Imnimo wrote:
       | >In a world where there's enough AI capability to process the
       | entire web and rewrite every page to remove something, the cost
       | of "changing history" is much reduced, so we can expect more of
       | it.
       | 
       | I gotta be honest, this scenario is not a concern that impacts my
       | choice of email provider.
        
       | estimator7292 wrote:
       | Is email immutable? Honestly I haven't looked into it very much,
       | but as an email self-hoster I do know that i have the ability to
       | decrypt any email in any user's inbox. I presume I could also
       | edit and re-encrypt them, but I don't really know.
       | 
       | But as in all cases, you can only be _truly_ sure no one is
       | tampering if you don 't give it to anyone else.
        
       | kuroguro wrote:
       | Clearly we need blockchain to solve this, not AI! /s
        
       | neuroelectron wrote:
       | General web immutability matters more than ever and not just
       | because of AI. Please support archive.org and its sister sites.
        
       | pkilgore wrote:
       | Kagi & Fastmail are two of my favorite bills to pay.
        
         | myhf wrote:
         | I stopped paying for Kagi because they added AI.
        
       | instagraham wrote:
       | The immutability of documentation tech matters more in a world
       | with AI.
       | 
       | The cameras used to document "news" will need to be watermarked,
       | fingerprinted and authenticated, like what Canon and Nikon are
       | already doing (and which AFP has already adopted).
       | 
       | It may have seemed gimmicky at first, but in a year or two,
       | you'll probably _only_ be able to trust visuals from companies
       | that do this (wire agencies like AFP, AP and Reuters are heavily
       | disincentivised to create fake news anyway but that 's another
       | topic).
       | 
       | At a certain level, I imagine social media apps will also
       | encourage direct camera-to-post for documentation/videos of
       | reality, since this will be the only end-to-end method to verify
       | an image was created unaltered. I can imagine a world where, if
       | you film a protest through the Instagram app, you'd get some kind
       | of "this is real" badge on it, whereas if you upload a video, it
       | gets treated as "could be AI" like 99% of all future content.
        
         | gmueckl wrote:
         | On the other hand, this requires locked down devices running
         | trusted apps. Otherwise, such a badge won't have any meaning.
        
           | vlovich123 wrote:
           | I think it's already irrelevant: cryptographic proofs of
           | video evidence is difficult to communicate to audiences while
           | watermarks will be learned by AI as trusted and injected into
           | AI videos anyway. Also, in between the lens and your eyeball
           | is usually a pipeline of editing applied anyway so either the
           | cryptographic signature ends up with every layer signing the
           | modifications applied + the previous layer or you stack
           | watermarks. But ultimately the original problem is how to
           | communicate the cryptographic chain validity.
        
             | JambalayaJimbo wrote:
             | Communication is a different story, do we know whether it's
             | possible in the first place? And that requires device
             | integrity.
        
               | pants2 wrote:
               | In theory this is where zero-knowledge proofs can come
               | in. That would allow you to apply transforms to the video
               | (crop, contrast, resize etc) and be able to prove the
               | exact transform that was applied. However it's still
               | computationally expensive.
        
             | skybrian wrote:
             | Most users don't care, but in theory a newspaper could use
             | this tech to verify certain camera images and their readers
             | could just trust that they've vetted things.
             | 
             | In practice, ordinary users don't care much about
             | mainstream media anymore.
        
           | drnick1 wrote:
           | > locked down devices running trusted apps
           | 
           | This is a bigger threat than phony AI videos.
        
             | aerostable_slug wrote:
             | To whom? I can imagine starting wars with fake videos.
             | 
             | It's hard to imagine someone kvetching about not being able
             | to sideload apps to their phone reaching that point of
             | significance. I don't mean to completely dismiss very real
             | concerns about what people can and can't do with their
             | purchases, but OTOH war involves actual people actually
             | dying, and manipulating media is a fantastic way to get
             | one.
        
               | bippihippi1 wrote:
               | removing methods to circumvent monitoring and control of
               | information makes it easier for a bad actor to take
               | advantave of these tools. Yes it's nice for the good guys
               | to be able to keep their code secure, but do you want a
               | dictator to be able to do that?
        
         | toasterlovin wrote:
         | Interestingly, I think Apple has inadvertently positioned
         | themselves very well to be able to authenticate various
         | activity as being done by an actual human. What if anything
         | they decide to do with that capability remains to be seen.
        
           | instagraham wrote:
           | The LIDAR sensor could be quite useful in authentication.
           | 
           | A lot depends on watermarking at source and the social media
           | platform using that to make a clickable/hard watermark
        
         | cm2187 wrote:
         | By the time the video reaches the end user (i.e. on tiktok and
         | the likes), it will have been re-compressed, edited, meme-ed,
         | voiced over a dozen time. So not sure how you preserve trust in
         | that chain.
        
           | instagraham wrote:
           | I imagine a new type of bluetick would emerge. There will
           | always be those who can't distinguish between a tick emoji
           | next to a username and the actual thing, but that's a UX
           | problem. Something shot and verified on-app could get a
           | special, clickable tick on it when it's shared.
           | 
           | This removes the possibilities for bad actors to just one -
           | the platform itself.
           | 
           | In any case, the audience will have to learn new ways to
           | "trust" and tech alone won't be the solution. But I've less
           | hope in people and more hope in new social contracts
           | 
           | I think LIDAR sensors would be useful to verify depth
           | information in an image, on a side note.
        
           | istrice wrote:
           | You don't, the only reliable source will be the source that
           | has signed the content. It basically takes us back to the
           | times when the only footage available was curated and
           | broadcast by TV.
        
             | cm2187 wrote:
             | Yeah, but I don't think Reuters, AP or AFP are anywhere
             | near the top 1000 most popular accounts on tiktok. So they
             | can sign anything they want, won't affect the average
             | tiktok user.
        
           | hombre_fatal wrote:
           | Also, one thing HNers get fundamentally wrong is that anybody
           | cares about trust/authenticity. And I don't see what's so
           | special about photo/video.
           | 
           | One of the most common forms of submissions on Reddit/Twitter
           | is an image with text, or a screenshot of a tweet, or a
           | screenshot of a headline that makes a claim, and everyone
           | takes it dead seriously.
           | 
           | Almost nobody is going "hmm let me look this up first to see
           | if it even exists or accurately represents the facts".
           | 
           | So if all you need is an image of text for people to believe
           | it, what does it even matter if you have this sophisticated
           | system where you require photos to be signed by camera
           | hardware or whatever? You aren't even putting a dent in how
           | bullshit spreads.
        
         | et1337 wrote:
         | New startup idea: point a C2PA camera at a screen and launder
         | videos through it at $1 per minute.
        
         | jrockway wrote:
         | I don't think this would accomplish anything. For one thing,
         | quite a bit of misinformation these days comes from official
         | government sources that can just compel the manufacturers to
         | turn over authentic signing keys. Remember that Trump just
         | posted an AI-generated video of himself shilling medbeds; when
         | it was pointed out as AI-generated, he deleted it. If Truth
         | Social checked the cryptographic signature, he'd order his
         | staff to sign it. They wouldn't dare say no.
         | 
         | The next flaw is that cameras are happy to record screens
         | playing AI-generated videos and mark them as authentic. Perhaps
         | you can tell today because the screen pixels aren't perfectly
         | 1:1 mapped to the image sensor pixels, but as soon as elections
         | depend on being able to do that, those screens will exist.
         | 
         | People are saying to add LIDAR to prevent this "record the
         | screen" hack, but a mirror over the LIDAR sensor and me sitting
         | at a desk motionless looks to LIDAR exactly like the world
         | leader I'm deepfaking sitting motionless at a desk. People are
         | not using AI to generate amazing action shots.
         | 
         | At the end of the day, people will have to take some personal
         | responsibility. Migrants probably aren't killing and eating
         | pets. Pets taste terrible and grocery stores that you can just
         | walk into and steal whatever you want exist. There isn't a bed
         | that can cure any disease. If someone says they do, even a
         | world leader, test them out on something non-critical. Break
         | off a fingernail and see if the magic bed can regrow it
         | overnight. If not, maybe stick to traditional cancer treatments
         | until there is some clearer evidence.
        
           | QuantumNomad_ wrote:
           | > those screens will exist
           | 
           | It's already possible. See the Stagecraft studio they built
           | for the production of TV series The Mandalorian.
           | 
           | > shooting the series on a stage surrounded by massive LED
           | walls displaying dynamic digital sets, with the ability to
           | react to and manipulate this digital content in real time
           | during live production
           | 
           | https://www.unrealengine.com/fr/blog/forging-new-paths-
           | for-f...
           | 
           | > The StageCraft process involves shooting live-action actors
           | and sets surrounded by large, very high-definition LED video
           | walls. These walls display computer-generated imagery
           | backdrops, once traditionally composited primarily in post-
           | production after shooting with chroma key screens. These
           | facilities are known as "volumes". When shooting, the
           | production team is able to realign the background instantly
           | based on moving camera positions. The entire CGI background
           | can be manipulated in real-time.
           | 
           | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StageCraft
        
         | WrongOnInternet wrote:
         | The problem with this approach is that it is easily bypassed.
         | Simply point your camera at a high quality monitor playing an
         | AI generated video, and there you go, and authenticated AI
         | video. In the future, video evidence is going to be as
         | convincing as it was for 99.9999...% of human history. We
         | survived with out it in the past. We'll survive without it in
         | the future.
        
           | canadiantim wrote:
           | What does it mean for the court system though, what happens
           | to video and image evidence?
        
             | deadbabe wrote:
             | That is for the jury to decide. If they think the evidence
             | is fabricated in some way, they will have reasonable doubt.
             | 
             | Lawyers must carefully pick jurors depending on how
             | susceptible they may be to AI manipulation.
        
             | jjk7 wrote:
             | Can AV evidence not be faked without AI tools?
        
             | dghlsakjg wrote:
             | We have been able to manipulate legal documents for 100s of
             | years. We have been able to manipulate images for over 100
             | years. We have been able to manipulate images on any
             | computer with a few hours of training for for 30+ years. We
             | have been able to manipulate videos with training for 20+
             | years.
             | 
             | It is an order of magnitude easier now (likely as easy as
             | documents have been to manipulate for 30ish years now).
             | However, this is not a new problem, courts have always had
             | to deal with manipulated evidence.
        
           | andrewflnr wrote:
           | I doubt it will be that easy to bypass. A fake would still
           | have to withstand pixel-level analysis on the level of
           | methods that already detect tampering in regular video. For
           | one thing, that will have to be a very high quality monitor
           | indeed to leave no detectable trace of e.g. moire patterns.
        
             | latexr wrote:
             | A fake doesn't need to be perfect to be effective, it just
             | needs to fool enough people. Most posts won't (and couldn't
             | ever) be scrutinised at that level.
        
         | latexr wrote:
         | > I can imagine a world where, if you film a protest through
         | the Instagram app, you'd get some kind of "this is real" badge
         | on it
         | 
         | On Instagram? The website owned by that guy who loves AI slop
         | and wants to fill your feed with it? That Instagram? Yeah,
         | doesn't seem likely.
         | 
         | https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/25/meta-launches-vibes-a-shor...
         | 
         | https://fortune.com/2024/10/30/mark-zuckerberg-ai-generated-...
         | 
         | https://futurism.com/zuckerberg-lonely-friends-create-ai
        
       | NoSalt wrote:
       | Commercial for FastMail???
        
       | kalap_ur wrote:
       | I mean, to be fair, Google's scam of how much GBs you have is
       | very annoying and downright scandalous.
       | 
       | I had 16.5GB or so used up so it was flashing red. When paid for
       | Gemini, my total space jumped to 2TB and my usage dropped to
       | 12GB. Disgusting. So might as well switch to fastmail. Not sure.
        
       | drnick1 wrote:
       | Email has never been immutable. Email that you receive on your
       | own server can be trivially altered, it's just a plain text file.
       | 
       | In fact until recently email was sent and received in the clear
       | like a postcard, the whole system wasn't designed to be secure or
       | secret in any way.
        
         | lexlambda wrote:
         | Immutable as in the message won't be altered/deleted by the
         | sender. This is. This is about user control, as opposed to chat
         | apps or social media, where posts are frequently edited, get
         | taken down after an outrage or links can disappear to link-rot.
         | 
         | From article: "An email is your copy, and the sender can't
         | revise it later."
        
       | wpollock wrote:
       | Until retired as a professor, I used Thunderbird and the GPG
       | plug-in to sign emails. That makes them immutable no matter who
       | hosts the email server you use. I encrypted the emails holding
       | grades, if the recipient said they were able to decrypt. Setup
       | was non-trivial but very doable. I also used (and still use) a
       | plug-in that clearly shows if any email fails DKIM or SPF (I
       | think DMarc too).
        
       | odyssey7 wrote:
       | No mention of the blockchain?
        
       | throwaway_0501 wrote:
       | Buried lede: Fastmail is using AI-generated code / words /
       | decision-making systems, just like everyone else and following
       | the same meaningless "principles" as everyone else.
       | 
       | > For our staff, we encourage understanding the tools that exist
       | in the world, and how to use them safely. Our policy makes it
       | clear that any use of tools, including tools with AI in them,
       | must follow clear privacy-preserving principles:
       | Data Protection: All data protection, confidentiality, and
       | privacy policies must be followed (our vendors for things like
       | anti-abuse and support are moving towards using AI for
       | translation, categorization, abuse detection - and we are
       | ensuring that their policies continue to provide protection for
       | our customers)              Accountability for work: Any AI
       | generated writing or code must be reviewed and understood by a
       | human being, and go through our regular second-set-of-eyes
       | processes before being used              Bias awareness: Actively
       | look for biases or hallucinations in AI output              Human
       | authority: Always have a path for appeal to a human from any
       | decision that is made by automated tools
        
       | akkartik wrote:
       | Email is only _part_ of my electronic memory. Over time it 's
       | become more important to me to maintain my own copies of my
       | memory on devices I control. The forms and formats are many, and
       | they all need a commitment to maintain control. So yes, use email
       | over more mutable media. And avoid remotely mutable extensions to
       | emails. And keep a local copy of your email. And maintain date-
       | stamped archives of stuff you work on, and keep your codebases
       | easy to run from any point in their history, and write good
       | notes. Constant vigilance.
        
       | AtlasBarfed wrote:
       | Where's the AI to address the number one issue I have with email?
       | 
       | If you count for automatically categorized Bayesian spam, it's
       | about 99% noise.
       | 
       | That's one of the things that sucks about the current AI. Being
       | employed by people that that are categorically opposed to using
       | it to enhance privacy and filter advertising.
        
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