On 5/3/22 22:45, John Levine wrote:
IMAP does header and content searches, and invariably indexes the message store and update the indices as messages arrive so the searches are reasonably fast. A lot of them use SIEVE or something like it to do mail sorting as the mail arrives. Other than storing all your keys in your IMAP server, how do you plan to do that? It is my impression that the vast majority of mail users leave their mail on the server and see the same folders from multiple devices, so this is not an edge case, it's the most common case. These are not trivial problems. The people who write mail servers are not completely inept, and if there were easy solutions to key management problems, we would have solved them.
I don't think anyone's claiming that these are trivial problems, or that there are easy solutions, or that the authors of such products are completely inept.
Of course, having email transmitted in cleartext creates lots of nontrivial problems also. It's just that we regard those problems as "normal", or pretend that they don't exist.
Keith
