A common situation in my life is the following: a small-ish organization consisting of somewhere from 3 to 50 people need some type of way to be reached as a group. The current solution is to have an email adress, normally with a password that is shared in some way among the trusted subset of members that need to be able to access the email directly.
The solution isn’t great for multiple reasons:
- Sharing a password among multiple people isn’t great, 2FA is tricky
- Most email communication are readable by the email provider, unless PGP is correctly used. For most people, PGP is non-trivial to use correctly, and meta-data will not be encrypted even with correctly used PGP.
But it has the following upsides:
- A single stable address to reach the group
- Communication is gathered in one place, searchable, possible to for multiple members to track communication with someone that has reached out.
- Easy to use from any device anywhere
Ideally we’d like all of these things: sensible access controls, some level of transparency within the org regarding who has responded to what messages, an address that is easy to share with people outside the group, minimal (meta)data accessible by the providers, and easy to use across devices.
How do you handle this? What would your recommendation be? I have considered setting up a Signal account, but having multiple signal accounts on a single device is non-trivial, as is setting it up on a new device, meaning that probably each group would need a single dedicated device, which isn’t super practical.
I don’t understand why you need encryption. It seems you are concerned about access control and metadata on the security side. If that’s the case, it is more advisable to host your own email server. However, be aware that once the email is sent, your recipient email system may be hosted by other email providers that you might not desire. You can reduce the metadata leaks by using encryption, but as you are aware, not everybody kin to use it. And to be effective, it must be used by both sides.
The issue you’re describing is why I’m not keen on email, and why I mention Signal as an alternative I’ve considered - Signal is a user-friendly way of ensuring both encryption and that meta-data isn’t accessible to providers on either end unless someone’s device is compromised.
The reason I’m interested in encryption is that I want a higher baseline of security for these orgs. In a changing political landscape it is hard to say what may become sensitive over time. Hypothetically, if one of these orgs is distributing contraceptives internationally we want neither meta-data about who is contacting them nor message contents to be accessible to providers. Since encryption is a pain with email we can assume both are accessible to providers when using that. Ideally I want encryption to be an easy default for both the orgs and the people contacting them.
Say your organization is doing something like Amnesty International (at least sounds awlful lot similar to me), you want a solution that
Am I correct? To be honest, it is quite a tall order. I can’t really think of a solution right now. Email is definitely out of the question because you can’t hide who is sending and receiving the email.