this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2025
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Privacy
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I am confused why you would use a single email address instead of a mailinglist.
It is also possible to set up a private forum with mailinglist capabilities.
Generally speaking it is better to find a trust worthy host, or host on your own hardware than trying to repurpose some public service and hope e2ee alone is sufficient.
The purpose of the email addresses tends to be something like contact@example.com - it's the central place outsiders contact the org. A common way to work with it would be that emails are checked during the orgs weekly/monthly meeting, incoming emails are discussed, and someone is tasked with writing a reply with the group's response to the email. I haven't seen mailing lists being used for this type of thing, but I guess that could be a solution for the password sharing, but at the cost of having individual email addresses in-house - some type of individual accounts would probably be necessary either way to get away from the whole shared passwords situations...
The appeal of Signal is that it's managed and has some level of security by default. My impression of securely configuring email, in particular on someone else's hardware, is that it is very technically challenging, but it's also not something I've ever attempted. Would you say my impression is correct?
I'm slowly also realizing that this is probably also a key requirement for a lot of these orgs: they do not have dedicated IT people or a lot of cash. A lot of the time there's someone with some IT interest, but rarely with time or interest in long term admin-ing.
Hmm yeah, I thought this is about organisation internal discussion. Of course if it is just a mailbox for outsiders to use, you could just configure some forwarders so that multiple people get the emails and can respond from their own account if necessary.
Selfhosting email specifically is quite hard. Not so much technically, but because of how a few large providers have cornered the market and drop most self-hosted emails reaching them with the excuse of fighting spam.
Hosting a forum that requires login credentials (incl. 2fa etc.) is quite easy though. But I guess that wouldn't work as a way for outsiders to contact you.
Right, forwarders solves the password issue, but the encryption issues remains. Any thoughts on how to handle that? PGP in my experience is non-trivial to set up correctly, and even when correctly setup does not protect metadata.