Apple supporting it won't help apple users one bit, because nobody else uses an actual application to check mails anymore. It's mostly web mail clients everywhere, and they obviously can't use encryption.
A few more privacy scandals break, and if Apple had an end-to-end encryption story that sounds roughly like: “If you’re using Apple products and services, you probably don’t need to think too much about the techy parts.” I could easily see Apple cementing their position for anyone even remotely concerned about privacy.
Apple the computer company. Apple the media company. Apple the smartphone conpany. Apple the consumer privacy and protection company? I could see it.
* On the device? Oops--device broke, guess my emails are gone forever
* In the "cloud"? -- Oops, can't guarantee encryption
Who generated the keys and how do you build trust?
For both of these, you can trust Apple do do the right thing, but that's putting all your eggs into that basket, similar to iMessage.
you're right its not an unsolved problem, its an unsolvable problem.
There is little point in encrypting mails between apple users, if the keys are kept on the apple servers. What would it achieve after all? Apple, and by extension every nation of importance would still have access.
the only reward you'd get from that is getting locked into the apple ecosphere even stronger, because now you won't be able to read your mail archive anymore unless you use an apple device.
And you obviously can kiss search goodbye. There is no way to search encrypted data after all, unless you decrypt it.
Got any data to back that up? I do, and so do a lot of my friends and colleagues.
Of course, hopefully PGP, and not some custom, private API like iMessage.
Of course, no one uses it or even realizes it's there because S/MIME is terrible.
I was playing around with using my own CA to issue certificates for internal stuff. I created a personal certificate for myself and imported it to my keychain - without doing anything, Apple Mail was digitally signing my messages. On the other side, however, people saw digital signatures that couldn't be verified and got confused by that.
[0] https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/mail/sign-encrypt-mess...