Email Security: Where We Are and What the Future Holds
Brief
Illustration: fria / Privacy Guides
Email is ubiquitous. If you want to function in modern society, you pretty much have to have an email address. What was originally just a simple protocol to send messages between machines has morphed beyond what it was originally intended for into the de facto authentication, identity, and "secure" communication channel for almost all technology users today.
It's been updated many times to fix security issues and there are more updates to come, but is it worth trying to fix a decades-old protocol, or should we scrap it all and start over?
Current State of Email Security
The Simple Mail Transport Protocol ( SMTP ) is the standard used to send emails.
Over the years, multiple protocols have been introduced to fix security issues and improve the usability of email, resulting in a complex mess that we're still feeling the consequences of to this day.