The proposed Dark Mail Alliance has been described as having “no logic” and having no business for internet service providers (ISPs) to adopt.
Speaking to IT Security Guru, Brian Spector, CEO of CertiVox, said that the proposed secure email protocol would not be used by big service providers as “it is just not commercially feasible for large scale ISPs to do so.”
Spector said: “What they are trying to do is get more ISPs to adopt it, there is no way the big internet service providers will use it. Maybe [for] small providers in Iceland who run these services, but I don’t think it is going to get adopted because it is just not commercially feasible for large scale ISPs. There is no upside to doing that as an actual sustainable business.”
The collective behind Dark Mail Alliance previously said that its concept is not a “business venture, but a moral and technological journey”. A secure back-end that will allow secure emails to be sent and received, it is created by two firms who dropped their secure email products in the face of Government intervention.
Responding, Mike Janke, CEO of Silent Circle and one of the founders of Dark Mail Alliance said that the Dark Mail Alliance does not need to have every provider in the world to adopt it, as with over 50 worldwide email providers from 30+ countries adopting it and offering it as a service, they are simply giving the world a new option.
“Citizens around the world can select from 50, 100 or 200 various email providers and have secure end-to-end email. We don’t just measure our success by whether Yahoo adopts it, because people and businesses that care to have secure communications can find 50+ providers to choose from,” he said.
“There will always be a segment of the population and teenagers that don’t care about security or don’t realise the implications. We judge success by the fact that Dark Mail will become a major option for citizens and businesses of the world and that is happening by small and medium providers implementing and offering it.”
Janke also said that there was a problem because a lot of people don’t understand what its intentions were, as it used peer-to-peer technology and utilised the architecture that the Dark Mail Alliance had developed.
“It is not intended to ‘completely replace all email architecture’, but rather to become an alternative option,” he said.
“With DarkMail there are no keys on a server. The email provider has nothing to turn over. At this point, we have overwhelming interest from ISPs around the world. We don’t need the Googles, Yahoos and Microsofts to adopt it or replace their systems with ours, there are hundreds of small and medium providers who are going to and will adopt it.
“Many [companies] are adopting it and will provide it as an optional service for those who care about security and privacy.”
