Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by itskokeh 12 days ago
Emails are very important especially at this age of rapidly changing technological landscape.

It's important that they're secure.

Is it possible to have E2E encryption on emails?

3 comments

Of course it is possible to have E2E encryption on emails. You can have E2E encryption on everything. Just use `age` and encrypt your message with sender public key. Easy.
> Easy

vbezhenar, this is your grandmother. I just got an email from you with a bunch of gobbledygook and I can't read it. /s

If it were that easy, everyone would be doing it.

I used to always use GPG, had my keys listed on keybase, which cross references my social media and websites to validate they're me. And there already is the first problem, how do you get and trust a public key? Key servers are chock full of fake keys. Just search Linus Torvalds on there...

But even then, the sheer amount of people who'd complain and wonder what the block of base64 data was at the bottom of the e-mail, or the strange attachments I'd have (including signing other attachments) was too much to have to deal with. For the once in a million people who ever looked at key signing...

I use GnuPG daily and mandate that everyone in our organization do the same. As part of the onboarding process, I have a doc explaining how to install GnuPG, generate keys and how to share their public key in a specific place in our network.

Once you force people to do it, it is not terrible once they get the hang of it.

> If it were that easy, everyone would be doing it.

E2E encryption is one click away in Telegram. I've yet to find anyone turn it on. Most people just do not care about encryption. The whole encryption story is pulled into mainstream by crypto-enthusiasts IMO.

> Is it possible to have E2E encryption on emails?

You literally have a proton email address on your profile.

I mean having it as a default. Big tech benefits from making emails unencrypted.

The question is, Can the encrypted mail be a default?

That can push email companies to make access to email a paid service. And that would cut out a huge chunk of world population from access to email.

It's a full chain reaction and that's why companies like Proton remain small

my brother in christ