| > 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... |