Why Are We Ignoring the Urgent Need for End-to-End Encrypted Emails?

There is a good technical essay (by experts) on why it's not possible in practice.

https://www.latacora.com/blog/2020/02/19/stop-using-encrypte...

Because it's not urgent. To almost everyone, it's not urgent. No matter how urgent you think it is, almost nobody else cares.

There's no actual demand. That's why.

you have to jump through hoops with third-party tools

I personally find it very easy to send PGP encrypted emails with Thunderbird. [1] Thunderbird makes encrypting email platform agnostic. I can switch vendors without losing my ability to maintain E2EE with friends and business partners. I have been able to get non technical friends and lawyers to use Thunderbird and PGP as they just follow the picture instructions.

This is just my own silly opinion but I would never personally rely on a platform to manage "E2EE" for me. If I do not generate and control the keys then I can not seriously call it E2EE. As such I do not consider WhatsApp and Signal to be end to end encrypted. That's just my personal opinion but perhaps I am just a bit touched in the head.

[1] - https://www.linuxbabe.com/security/encrypt-emails-gpg-thunde...

It’s really because Microsoft and Google control such a huge percentage of email now

No one has their own email server anymore because your mail won’t get through to those platforms and you can’t touch the uptime… it’s a different sort of monopoly… a free-opoly?

I dont send emails to anyone who has a gmail, googlemail. yahoo mail or microsoft or any of the other careless email providers.

It really is as simple as telling people that I do not reply to emails unless they respect my privacy and use an encrypted privacy oriented email provider.

I use the Protonmail SimpleLogin addon account to send them an annonymous email stating my terms for email correspondence.

It does work. then those same people move permanently to those email providers and start respecting my privacy and their own privacy.

One person at a time.

Its about time we imposed our own values regarding confidentiality and privacy.

you cannot wait for the brainwashed to move away from a life of giving up their privacy

It's difficult, because no one company can do it on their own. Proton has encrypted email, but if you send an email to someone's Gmail account, or someone's email box at their personal domain, it's sitting on that server unencrypted at the end of the day.

Gmail owns a huge percentage of the market, which would go a long way, but like you alluded to, they aren't going to give up the email scanning they can do. Without that, I'm not sure Gmail is still worth it for them to run. They'd probably shut it down.

Could someone explain what happened via telephony?

Telegraph->Operator->Rotary->Touch-tone->Cellphone.

It would seem everyone of these would be a next step in technology and protocols.

Sending a text message via rotary phone is probably not possible. However, calling a rotary phone via smartphone should work.

Is there a reason why newer protocols could not be implemented/enforced?

Whereby email from proton to tuta (and similar new email services) it acts differently than when sent to the older version of email (current method).

You have already answered your question. Unless Google and Microsoft agree to implement a common E2E encryption standard for Gmail and Outlook, there is no hope.

The other hope is if some EU law does it for us :) . I am not aware if there are any discussions going in this direction.

I believe it's because a while ago Mootie or whatever his name is wrote an influential article basically saying it's impossible (you should use his app instead). I guess people just accepted it.

The mail server has to read the body of the mail message, which throws out any E2E use. SMTP is from the 1980s. There are countless SMTP servers on the Internet. You want spam filtering? Server-side rules? Can't have E2E.

That, and more, is why E2E isn't available for SMTP-based email. Many modern SMTP servers support opportunistic-TLS, potentially securing email traffic between two SMTP servers. Or forced TLS when you know the target supports TLS connections.

This isn't some "money making" or "spyware" conspiracy. It is a product of history, decentralization, and momentum.

Comparing that to modern chat apps which can be built from the ground up and their messaging protocol doesn't rely on a 40 year old standard is disingenuous at worst, ignorant at best.