For example, issues not raised so far include: there is little
or no MUA development these days;
Outlook is the only desktop MUA I know of that gets significant
development, and the changes are mostly for non-mail stuff. Thunderbird
was declared dead, but still gets regular updates. It is my impression
the updates are mostly due to the large amount of code it shares with
Firefox.
On the other hand, there is tons of MUA development for mobile devices.
Look in the Apple and Google app stores and you will find hundreds of mail
clients. Many claim to support S/MIME and PGP; I haven't looked to see
how usable they are.
The really BIG players are, possibly with an exception or two, also
pushing Webmail rather than MUAs on the user devices.
I think the cause and effect are reversed here. Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail,
and AOL all have perfectly functional IMAP and submission servers, and I
have them all set up in alpine. Nonetheless, you are correct that
everyone uses webmail because it requires no extra setup, works on all of
their computers, and due to the rapid improvment of web browsers in the
past decade, webmail has if anything better UI features than separate
MUAs. Before we put a lot of effort into MUA crypto we might want to
revisit MUA configuration and whatever else makes them painful to set up
and use.
R's,
John
PS:
Yes. I note that a proposal or two were made long ago to move
toward a three-layer envelope (transport information, trace
information, and the rest of the current headers) rather than
todays two-layer (transport and and current headers including
trace info) went absolutely nowhere.
As I recall Ned gave us a strong hint that has patent problems.
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