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by cryptonector 2654 days ago
End-to-end encrypted e-mail is an exceedingly difficult problem.

First, none of the envelope can be encrypted, sorry -- that's routing information, and it must be visible to all involved MTAs. The communications between MTAs can be encrypted with TLS, but the MTAs get to see the envelope.

Second, end-to-end key management is an O(N^2) problem unless you have introducers. Who shall be your introducers?

If the introduction problem was trivial to solve, we'd all be using PGP/whatever now. But it's not trivial at all.

Besides that, it's nice to have IMAP/whatever be able to search your e-mail. Which means your e-mail servers need to be able to see your e-mail. You can give up on this if you have your devices decrypt and index your e-mail. This is the only part of the problem that is "easy" -- and you can even encrypt e-mail as it comes in when it's not already encrypted.