[upofadown]

People routinely do end to end encryption with email every day using either OpenPGP or S/MIME. Heck, email encryption is where the term "end to end encryption" came from. When someone claims E2EE for some other sort of messaging system they have to at least be as good at it as the email case to be taken seriously.

[wolverine876]

> People routinely do end to end encryption with email every day using either OpenPGP or S/MIME.

Those solutions encrypt only the content and not the headers, which are just as important. Also, encrypting the content prevents some webmail services from functioning, such as search.

Email can't really be made secure.

[dane-pgp]

> Those solutions encrypt only the content and not the headers, which are just as important.

There are implementations which encrypt the headers, for example Delta Chat, which says[0] in its FAQ:

'Many other e-mail headers, in particular the “Subject” header, are end-to-end-encryption protected, see also this upcoming IETF RFC.'

If you mean that the sender's server and the recipient's server can see the recipient's and sender's (respectively) addresses, then I would say that this is equivalent to most other "end to end encrypted" messaging apps, which usually rely on a trusted third party to connect the two ends.

In fact, I would argue that the situation with email is better, because although Alice and Bob's providers might know that they are communicating with each other, Carol's provider will have no record of this at all (and Alice and Bob may not know that Carol or her provider exists).

The situation with email could be made even better than that, though, since email servers could provide a dedicated "switchboard" address, such that Alice sends her email for Bob as an encrypted inner-message of an email sent to Bob's server's switchboard address. That way Alice's server wouldn't know who the intended recipient was, only their server address. Similarly Alice's server could rewrite the headers of her outer-message so that Bob's server doesn't know that Alice was the original sender. This would effectively implement a type of anonymous remailer.[1]

> encrypting the content prevents some webmail services from functioning, such as search.

You've shifted the goalposts here from "email can't be secure" to "webmail can't be secure". In any case, I disagree. It is possible to implement a client-side full text search[2], even if it means decrypting the index for every search, and re-encrypting the index whenever a new email is added to it.

[0] https://delta.chat/pt/help#how-does-delta-chat-protect-my-me...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_remailer

[2] https://lucaongaro.eu/blog/2019/01/30/minisearch-client-side...

[wolverine876]

This is bad advice, which could be dangerous for some. Look around for what actual security experts recommend: It's not email, and it's specifically to not use email. It's not a debate; it's universal afaik.

[upofadown]

The headers are mostly protected with the TLS used for the connections between the server and the clients and other servers. Email is no worse than most things these days and better than many.

* https://articles.59.ca/doku.php?id=em:anonemail

[wolverine876]

(see my response to the other comment, above; thanks)

[pyuser583]

Hmmm!? Most people use emails via cloud services. I don’t think Eudora is still a thing.

[upofadown]

But Thunderbird and Claws and Sylpheed and K-9 and Fairmail are things. There is Mailvelope for webmail.