[cwoac]

A nice approach, I will look at implementing it on my setup at home; Probably worth noting that if you are taking these steps then running it all out of an encrypted filesystem is probably a sensible addition. Although if you are looking at doing this you probably have an encrypted filesystem already.

[FedRegister]

And likely have plain-jane, no TLS SMTP mail being delivered which means it's trivial for your upstream provider to read your (unencrypted) email.

[rmk2]

Exactly. So why bother at all right? Root password? "root" will do. Encrypted partitions on the server? Useless. SSH keys? Silly overengineered junk.

Following the same logic, why bother setting strong passwords on Gmail? Or even bother at all with 2FA, I mean, after all, somebody can just read your unencrypted email in transit anyway, right?

This comment is not helpful at all. The original article did not mention with a single word the NSA or anything like it[1], but he is worried about things being stolen or hacked.

> So what does this get me? If somebody steals my laptop or phone, they can't access my email from my IMAP clients local store because it's all encrypted and my private PGP key is password protected. If somebody guesses my IMAP password, or uses an exploit to gain access to my account, they can't read my email because what they retrieve is encrypted.

And for both scenarios, the proposed tools are very much helpful.

[1]: Partially because the article says "Published @Thu, 13th Jan 2011"

[FedRegister]

>Exactly. So why bother at all right? Root password? "root" will do. Encrypted partitions on the server? Useless. SSH keys? Silly overengineered junk.

>Following the same logic, why bother setting strong passwords on Gmail? Or even bother at all with 2FA, I mean, after all, somebody can just read your unencrypted email in transit anyway, right?

That's not even remotely what I'm claiming. Stop being a dick. Yes, you should always have good passwords on your accounts and use 2FA. But if you want to send something secret across the Internet you might want to choose another method than (unencrypted) email.

>This comment is not helpful at all. The original article did not mention with a single word the NSA or anything like it, but he is worried about things being stolen or hacked.

If someone really wants to read your mail they'll compromise the host your mail is on and read it before you get a chance to encrypt it. In that case this "solution" does nothing. It keeps a casual person out but does nothing to stop a more advanced attacker.