[orev]

The more we assume that everyone is using the big email providers, the more it becomes a reality. And everyone agrees that a centralized Internet controlled by only a few companies is one of the worst case scenarios.

I have no certainty at all that any of those free providers use encryption at rest. How would they mine the messages for data to sell? And, cloud compute is expensive, and disk encryption takes more CPU cycles. Why would they spend that money? SMTP connections are more visible so it makes sense to use that from a marketing standpoint.

[prash_murali21]

Yeah the big providers will not be encrypting at rest for sure. Even if so, the encryption keys would lie with the provider and not the end user, which kind of defeats the purpose.