CAcert System Admins discussion list

[IanG <iang AT cacert.org>]

I've gone through Daniel's email process and set up the 
email for the address above, and got it working [1].   He 
has set up some instructions over at the wiki, which we can 
all follow and improve:

    http://wiki.cacert.org/wiki/CommunityEmail



It's probably worthwhile to recall why he is doing this.

At the 'top' there was a discussion about setting up better 
support for encrypting email, a little because of general 
threats to our email [2] but mostly because as a CA we 
should be able to show we can do it, comprehensively.  "Eat 
your own dogfood" the Americans say.  A way to meet our mission.

Encrypting everything somehow conflicted with another 
discussion about escrowing official email, coming out of the 
Arbitration and Threats discussions.  Escrow was considered 
to be a serious benefit if we ever get hit by legal 
discovery, because the email is then already collected. 
This will save us a heap of bureaucracy [3].

=============
m20070920.2: Agreed to ask that the new email system can be 
set up to automatically archive everything on "official" 
lists. Privacy officer to be consulted before actually 
implementing it.
=============

As we know, encrypted lists are a "hard problem".  The rough 
high level design was felt to be using CAcert servers as the 
IMAP/POP/SMTP servers for all official traffic.  This way, 
we could do both encrypted mail (over TLS) and also do the 
escrow part (by central capture).

The first phase of this work is now complete, there is a 
complete setup of encrypted servers available.



This leaves some phases left.

1.  the escrowed system as mentioned in m20070920.2.

2.  a policy by which people are allocated email addresses @ 
cacert.org .  This is currently before M-SC, see wiki.

3.  a related initiative to give wider access to the 
community access to this sort of protected email.  The 
current working title for this is community.cacert.org.  Who 
then is to be given this access?  Full Assurers?  All 
Members?  150 point Assurers?

For these items, there are a lot of details to work out.  Of 
course, all this can change.  But the basic work done so far 
is good and useful.

Meanwhile, all, it will help to setup your email addresses 
so we can move over to this method, as per the decision(s) 
agreed at 'top'.



iang @ cacert . org



[1] Temporarily, as I don't want an "official" address, I'll 
work with the "community" address when it turns up.

[2] Which created an unusual and delicious tension with the 
policy to be open in all things.

[3] I agree that this benefit can only be appreciated by 
those who've been through American-style legal discovery :)