Part of the problem with securing email is that it’s a framework of legacy. Email has been around since the 1960s and very little has actually changed. We have awesome services that will maintain the servers or make the interfaces user friendly but the biggest problem with email is that it wasn’t designed around encryption.

Even a lot of encryption enthusiast often mention that they don’t bother using PGP. It’s not that the software doesn’t work; in fact when used correctly it’s probably one of the safest ways to send sensitive information.

To replace email let’s take a second to figure out what we use email for. It’s more then a messaging platform.

Verification

It might seem weird to think we use email as a form of verification especially now that we know how easily email security can be compromised. The first thing a lot of services do when you sign up for them is send a confirmation email to you.

If you log into your Facebook from a new OS or a different state you’ll often get a ‘Strange Activity’ notice. Whatever we use to replace email should probably have a similar system.

Archiving

Like encryption archiving is something that was not originally part of email when it was invented. With services like Google giving 15GB of email storage we keep a lot on our email servers almost indefinitely.

This is just a large vault of containing years of unencrypted private data. Often you don’t want that information being made public. There should be a way to protect all that data even if it’s stored on someone else computer.

Communication

This is the most obvious part of is email. Countless advancements have been made in improving the way we communicate. Public forums such as chatroom are as old as the connected web but in the last 10 years we have really improved the way we secure our private communication.

Possible solutions

There are a few technologies that I think if implemented can be used to replace all that email does for us in a more secure way. Personally it looks like out best option is to break these three uses into individual parts.