mailvelope_client VS TextSecure

Webmail: Many people don't even use an e-mail client today -- they use webmail to access their messages, or they use a local app that itself depends heavily on a webmail server on the backend to do the heavy lifting. When the server is doing the e-mail handling and rendering work, the server has to have access to the cleartext. Even in situations where the messages are decrypted in javascript (or a Java applet) on the client side, if the client-side code is sent by the server, the server could be compromised and told to send different code (see Hushmail's failures in 2007) How do we fix this? We need more e-mail client developers to take e2ee e-mail seriously, and we need them to focus on security and usability. Browser-extension-based e-mail clients are another possibility (e.g. Mailvelope and its interaction with webmail) systems like Roundcube), but they still rely on a lot of metadata to be exposed on the server-side.

Moxie's reasons for disallowing Signal distribution via F-droid always rang a little flat to me ( https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/127 ). Lots of chatter about the supposedly superior security model of Google Play Store, and as a result fewer eyes independently building and testing the Signal code base. Everyone is entitled to their opinions, but independent and reproducible builds seem like a net positive for everyone. Always struggled to understand releasing code as open source without taking advantage of the community's willingness to build and test. Looking at it in a new light after the XZ backdoor, and Jia Tan's interactions with other FOSS folk.

Signal has documentation on how to reproduce their Play Store builds and compare them with what you've installed locally:

https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/blob/main/reprod...

There's nothing on Signal blog as of yet, but Signal's git repository was tagged with v7.0.0 yesterday and we can see from the commit history since the previously tagged version (v6.74.4) that there will be a setting to hide one's phone number [1], as well as disabling the previous default behavior of advertising that one is on Signal to all their contacts already using it [2].

[1] https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/commit/8797236b5... (PNP stands for "Phone Number Privacy")

[2] https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/commit/6097e6c30...

Signal works the same but without the user tracking from Meta/Facebook. Many people use it as well but I'm surprised that a majority sticks to WhatsApp.

Telegram and Signal solve this.

Sadly yes: Looks like an open issue 13290 for Signal, sounds like they were/are indeed still interacting through google's push notification service, wat, and per a link at that issue it was a chore for Tutanota to break away once they realised it was a problem some years ago (though at least they thought about it years ago? wtf Signal...)

Here is one: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/tree/main/reprod...

Rule 1: Posts to r/signal must relate to Signal.