[marc0]

I always wondered why there are no mainstream mail clients which use encryption by default. With "by default" I do not mean that it's an option that may be turned on or not. Rather, as soon as an e-mail address is entered when composing a mail the client should search the key servers for available public keys, import them and encrypt the message. Likewise, it shouldn't even be possible to launch a mail client without having generated a key pair for your address.

I see of course that there is this movement towards webmail, and this makes things more complicated. Wouldn't it be possible to write an online version of an encryption-friendly mail client? I mean, a web service which polls your mails via POP/IMAP from any server, and where the encryption is done client side in javascript. If that doesn't exist, maybe we should write one.