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Re:The Dream of Usable Email Encryption Is Still a Work in P... by adrianN on Sunday March 27, 2016 @05:31AM (#11369449)
I agree with you, but I think that we should try to make encryption something that you don't have to "do". HTTPS is widely used even by people who don't really care about their privacy, because it just happens automatically. I'm not sure whether it will ever be possible to do the same with e-mail, but I think it would be cool if all messages where encrypted and authenticated by default.
Re:The Dream of Usable Email Encryption Is Still a Work in P... by Freak_NL on Sunday March 27, 2016 @06:32AM (#11369549)
The challenge here with authenticated end-to-end encryption, is that it depends on having the user's private key available. Whereas for HTTPS no secret knowledge factor belonging to the user is needed (unless you use client-side certificates). That simplifies matters quite a bit.
Re:The Dream of Usable Email Encryption Is Still a Work in P... by XorNot on Sunday March 27, 2016 @08:56AM (#11369815)
Trust would be a better problem to solve then encryption, at least initially. The big problem plenty of people have with email (and for me at least, the phone) is establishing who I'm actually talking to when dealing with a business.

It would be really great if when my bank emailed me, the message was signed with the key they use on their website so we could seamlessly establish that it was really from them.

Re:The Dream of Usable Email Encryption Is Still a Work in P... by Freak_NL on Sunday March 27, 2016 @09:44AM (#11369918)
Unfortunately, banks (at least in The Netherlands) seem to favour a different solution altogether, which is not to send e-mails at all, but expect you to log on frequently on their on-line banking environment to look in your banking 'inbox' there.

Banks, insurance companies, pension funds, the revenue service, the local municipal government; they all expect you to frequently log on to their portals, and look at their digital correspondence addressed to you there. Some do send a notification e-mail stating that 'a message is waiting for you', but you never know if that message is actually important or merely trivial noise. They have declared e-mail dead.

I abhor this situation, because with e-mail (and coincidentally, old-fashioned paper mail) all correspondence addressed to me comes to me in a single inbox, where I can archive and backup important stuff. I really wish I had the option to simply upload my GPG public key to these portals so that all these phony inboxes simply mailed me my correspondence encrypted!

Re:The Dream of Usable Email Encryption Is Still a Work in P... by chopin on Sunday March 27, 2016 @07:19AM (#11369626)
That's of course only possible with the (imho) broken CA system.