"Never send encrypted messages to unverified devices from this device" is confusing wording

[lampholder]

It would be better to be "Only send encrypted messages to verified devices from this device."

[turt2live]

ftr this was intentionally skipped during the affirmative sprint because of the complexity involved in changing the behaviour. It's one of the few tied into the js-sdk, which makes it difficult to rename/fallback like the others.

[richvdh]

This setting is still present as of today, on the "Security & Privacy" tab:

... though I guess it's going to be removed from there as part of #26468.

It's also present at the room level, where afaik there are no plans to remove it.

It will, I think, be made completely redundant by matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals#4153 (aka the "Exclude insecure devices when sending/receiving messages" labs flag).

Aside:

ftr this was intentionally skipped during the affirmative sprint because of the complexity involved in changing the behaviour. It's one of the few tied into the js-sdk, which makes it difficult to rename/fallback like the others.

I don't understand this. AFAICT this issue only proposes to change the label, not the impl?

[turt2live]

The "affirmative sprint" was an effort to change all of our settings to be written in an affirmative way ("Don't send messages" default off -> "Send messages" default on). From memory, trying to change the label to be in the positive was complicated at the time because it was routed outside the SettingsStore, and the inverse language wasn't really representative of what we were thinking at the time.

An easy no-op change might be to rephrase it as "Only send to verified devices", but I honestly don't recall why we didn't do that in 2019.