Note that you can also invite people by sending them a link to a document and then connect to them from the user sidebar. They don't really need an account to access documents.
The main reason for the lack of simpler invitation using email is that we don't really want users to give us the mail of other users to invite. This goes against the "privacy" we are promising users.
We are essentially a group of people (home-owner association but for condos, in Canada). None of these are tech people, they also might not own a computer, but just a tablet and a phone.
The main issue was trying to invite them to a team. I had all their email addresses already, because our main form of communication is email, but I had to go to them one by one and ask them for a link (ID? I can't remember) to give to me so that I could invite them.
Essentially, I get the privacy concern, but I already had all their email addresses, so it was protecting data and making a workflow more complicated, for a use-case we didn't have.
We even implemented links that can be used multiple times before an expiration date.
Concerning the privacy of emails, YOU had the emails, but the SERVER ADMIN does not.. To send an email from the server, the server would need to receive the emails in clear.
As a side note, when you invite somebody to a service by letting the service send the email, you are leaking their email to that service, so to be respectful of people's privacy, we should not send the invite without their consent receive first. I get that nobody does that and there is a sort of implicit consent and that the risks of misuse of the email ate low.. If we ever implement that feature we would have to show a warning.
I understand that, but in this case the server admin and myself were the same people, on my home server, so there wasn't anything leaking anywhere really.
That being said, this was about a year ago. Invite links that you can send manually by email and people can join the team would be more than sufficient, I don't need the system to send the email for me, I just need an invite link.
The problem was the reverse, I needed each user to send me an ID (I think it was an Id) so that they could be invited.
I'm from the CryptPad team.
This is an interesting feedback.
Note that you can also invite people by sending them a link to a document and then connect to them from the user sidebar. They don't really need an account to access documents.
The main reason for the lack of simpler invitation using email is that we don't really want users to give us the mail of other users to invite. This goes against the "privacy" we are promising users.
Ludovic