Simon Willison’s Weblog

Email interfaces

18th June 2002

Peter Van Dijck: Email interface design 101—a short article examining the possibilities of using email interfaces for web applications. This is an interesting topic and one that deserves further exploration. I am particularly interested in the security problems faced when building this kind of interface (something that is not covered by Peter’s article)—how can you effectively secure an email interface? I’m guessing that for true security the only real solution is PGP encrypted mail and some kind of password driven authentication system. Peter’s blog carries a discussion on the article.