Email Immutability Matters More in a World with AI

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

> 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

But as in all cases, you can only be truly sure no one is tampering if you don't give it to anyone else.

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.

I gotta be honest, this scenario is not a concern that impacts my choice of email provider.

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.