[l72]

Sure, but sometimes we don't care about knowing who is communicating. For example:

I don't care if someone knows my bank sent me a message, but I want the content of the message to be secure (not just in transit, but also at rest)

I don't care if someone knows my primary care physician sent me a message, but I want my lab results to be secure.

I don't care if someone knows I communicated with my CPA, but I want my tax and receipts to be secure.

[dale_glass]

True, but that's incredibly user unfriendly. The average person isn't good at doing that level of risk evaluation. What's important and what not isn't intuitive.

And we have a much friendlier than GPG system for that: putting that on a website protected by HTTPS.

[l72]

But that puts all the data on a 3rd party site where I _might_ be able to make a copy of it for myself. It is annoying to get an email from my bank about an "important message", and instead of just sending me the message, I now have to go to the bank's app to read it. Oh, and it disappears after 30 days, so I have no way to archive it or look back on important messages from a year ago.

A government system could easily implement s/mime transparently for all emails sent within that system (meaning any other government agency or registered providers).