Your last statement is just not true. My mother struggles to log into Facebook. "It works on the other computer". Yes, because the password is cached on the browser there; it's not on my laptop. "I'm putting the right password in but it's not working". No, you're not. Etc.

So are you arguing that facebook shouldn't have launched, because users exist who don't understand how to log in to it?

No, I'd certainly not compare a web service which nearly everyone uses - and for many is the only reason they have an internet connected device in the first place - with an encryption technology practically no-one uses.

Someone here suggested that "PGP isn't too hard - you just need to spend 30 minutes studying cryptography before you use it" which pretty much makes my case for me!

I'm sad that we've gotten to the point where asking users to make a small investment of time makes a product basically a non-starter. There's such a thing as too much convenience.

It really is hard to estimate ability within the general population by one example.

In any case, it would be much simpler to direct someone to Proton mail, which uses OpenPGP.

Proton mail doesn't support IMAP, 3rd party clients, or email export. If you decide you no longer want to use Proton but you want to keep some of your emails, you have to manually save the contents of each message. It's irresponsible to recommend Proton without mention of the commitment involved.

Oh yeah - lol - email clients. I remember them. No, the solution has to work seamlessly with gmail, yahoo, hotmail, outlook, whatever clients people are using. It needs to be everywhere or it might as well require a different protocol/client altogether.