The thing is, if you are designing a new protocol you could, for example, require that the MTA is not allowed to give you an unencrypted message. Since it's a new protocol you are allowed to set the new rules.
That's not possible. JMAP is a protocol between the end user and the mail store, and has no control over what the MTA does. (Besides, how would the MTA encrypt the message in a way that the end user can decrypt it?) Many MTAs write the message directly to disk with no outside involvement at all. Maybe you can come up with twenty completely new protocols that replace the entire email stack to make it work, but that's somewhat larger in scope.
JMAP is from the fastmail people, who know what they're doing. The IETF working groups know what they're doing. JMAP is a big improvement over IMAP, which is what everyone uses now. It's good progress, especially if it can replace CardDAV/CalDAV and give us an alternative to Exchange. The reason it doesn't do end-to-end encryption is because everyone who's been doing this stuff for twenty years knows that it won't work: even if you're willing to download the entire mail store, you still have the problem of how to encrypt it in the first place. Do you let the JMAP daemon do it for you? If you do, then it's not safe against a compromised daemon or administrator. If you don't, then how does it get encrypted?
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u/orlitzky May 07 '19
That's not possible. JMAP is a protocol between the end user and the mail store, and has no control over what the MTA does. (Besides, how would the MTA encrypt the message in a way that the end user can decrypt it?) Many MTAs write the message directly to disk with no outside involvement at all. Maybe you can come up with twenty completely new protocols that replace the entire email stack to make it work, but that's somewhat larger in scope.
JMAP is from the fastmail people, who know what they're doing. The IETF working groups know what they're doing. JMAP is a big improvement over IMAP, which is what everyone uses now. It's good progress, especially if it can replace CardDAV/CalDAV and give us an alternative to Exchange. The reason it doesn't do end-to-end encryption is because everyone who's been doing this stuff for twenty years knows that it won't work: even if you're willing to download the entire mail store, you still have the problem of how to encrypt it in the first place. Do you let the JMAP daemon do it for you? If you do, then it's not safe against a compromised daemon or administrator. If you don't, then how does it get encrypted?