Ask Slashdot: Could E-Mail ever Replace Snail Mail?

dlc asks: "The recent USPS question got me thinking. One of the major things traditional mail has going for it that email doesn't is the fact that, for the most part, signing a letter (marking it as authentic) is easier to do, or, at least, the technology to do so is much more common, and is much more widely understood. Similarly, one of the obstacles standing in the way of universal acceptance of email as a legitimate means of reliable transmission is the fact that it is difficult to verify the sender of a message. Digital certificates and a world wide (or at least wide-spread) public key infrastructure would go a long way towards removing this obstacle. My question for the slashdot population is this: Under what circumstances do you see digital cirtificates, PKI, and encryption in general becoming part of normal email usage, to the point where people have as much confidence in the authenticity of email as they do in regular mail? "

Comments

Why certs aren't working yet

[dmorin]

I've had the opportunity to build client-side certificate systems for two companies now, one customer based (Liberty Mutual Funds) and one intranet (State Street Bank). I've written on the subject a bunch, and our work at Liberty was a case study for a book on digital signatures. Some reasons why they don't work yet:

• Too much new info coming out of your browser. Typical customers don't understand the deluge of messages they'll get about Certificate Authorities, and accepting things forever, etc... Solution: I don't know. It took a long time (and lots of bad scifi movies) for people to understand the notion of username and password. It's going to take longer to understand the notion of a digital certificate.
• You're still expected to provide a password (to protect your private keys). In many eyes, this defeats the purpose. Sure, you've reduced a bunch of username/password combinations to one password, but it's still something to remember. Solution: Some sort of biological print, such as iris, or thumbprint. The key being that you don't have to remember anything, you just have to show up. (Of course this brings up all sorts of privacy/security issues about copying that data. I've met people with about $100 in the bank who are afraid of being killed and having someone cut off their thumb. Seriously.)
• Corporate paranoia. I've seen places where they take out the normal username/password, and put in clientside certificates, and then put BACK a webserver ACL protection. They're paranoid about turning off the passwords. Then they ask, what did we gain from certificates? Well, nothing. Solution: More knowledge usually lessens paranoia. A few companies out in front demonstrating that it can be done, a few Forrester reports or something saying that certificates are ok, and here look, company X is using them without a problem, will start getting the pointy haired bosses interested.
• Non portable. Although a variety of standards exist for transporting your certificates, see earlier point about the whole process being too confusing for the average surfer. Solution: Smart cards. Put the digital certificate, along with a copy of your thumbprint, on the card. Stick the card in, put your thumb on the scanner, it's you.

Those are a few of the main problems with certs, in my experience. Of course, each of those has it's own issues and could be an entire thread. But I'm at work doing non certificate related things, so I can't really discuss it all day. :)

Shipping packages will only increase.

[grappler]

While snail mail will obviouly never go away completely, I think package shipping has pretty much got it made.

Snail mail is typically a delivery of INFORMATION, which can now be better done in other ways. With packages, you are sending a THING, and until some star-trekkish system goes into widespread use, more and more packages will be shipped through FedEx, UPS, etc.

I used to almost never have things shipped to me - I'd go buy them. But since I can now easily do price comparison shopping and find good deals online, I have ordered things shipped to me every week or so.

So THAT service is definately on the increase.