[feld]

Even GMail could launch end-to-end encrypted email if they wanted to do so for all GMail users. They own the entire infrastructure end-to-end; that's not the hard part.

The hard part is encrypting email for anyone -- even if they don't use your service.

[phaer]

Well the hardest part is to persuade most users that end to end encryption is something they actually want.

If GMail would launch an integration with PGP (or similar), call it "Secure GMail - now extra private" or something and start to refer to unencrypted Mail as "unsafe", "untrusted" or something like this much would have been won.

[hobarrera]

The problem with GMail launching browser-encrypted email is that you have two groups of people:

(a) People that don't care about encryption. Unlikely to get any signifacant amount of adoption. (b) People who do. This group of people know that browser-based encryption can't be done in a trusted manner, hence, won't want to use such a product.

[tokenizerrr]

Luckily Google's thought of that. They're working on an extension: https://code.google.com/p/end-to-end/