Further, the general notion that email is predominately insecure is often wrong-
-TLS is used for most transports now.
-Email seldom transits through intermediaries (in the less connected world most had layers of smarthosts that were intermediate steps. Now almost all email is sent from origin organization directly to the destination organization, only diverging for highly secure intermediary like Erado).
I still wouldn't ever imagine emailing yourself passwords (email yourself an encrypted spreadsheet sure...to refute another comment, encryption in Office 2007+ is more than adequate) and the like, but just needed to address the hysterics about email.
FWIW, I know security folks at Google and NSA. Google definitely wins the talent war.
When one is Google, it is. Not to mention that NSA very much cares for the trillions of information Google has to offer them and their continuing compliance.
It's very hard for me to imagine truly trusting that China cannot get into Gmail. Even if you have a great source. :-P
Google detected them, locked them out, identified over 20 other companies that had been compromised and notified all of them. Furthermore getting compromised was a wake-up call - they immediately took a lot of steps to improve their own security.
See http://techcrunch.com/2010/01/12/google-china-attacks/ for verification of some of this.
So China went after the easier target - users. Users are easy to compromise.
Therefore in 2011 Google notified hundreds of users (including many members of the government) that their accounts had been compromised by China. See http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/06/01/gmail-compromised-... for verification.
Note that this time Google's infrastructure was not targeted. Just end users and still Google tracked it down and notified people.
No system is perfect. I guarantee that Google knows this. But Gmail has a far better claim than any other email system I know of to claim to being able to beat Chinese hackers. (That said, I'm sure that China has not given up.)
Also, wasn't Google tracking everyone's movement everywhere, on Android? This is not a company I trust.
You'd think, if that were true, Google would indicate somewhere that, yes indeed, they do encrypt your email.
It really makes more sense to store unencrypted, and then secure access. The difficulty that motivated and well-prepared attackers have had in getting access demonstrates that they have done a very good job of securing access.
gmail was broken into by someone representing the chinese government. google fully admitted to this. this admittance did not seem to hurt their rep. they would probably admit to it if it had happened again.
google soon thereafter asked the nsa to help them out with security.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02...
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/05/science/05google.html
I am not saying that it's impossible for China to get in, but I'm sure it's a whole lot harder
The huge difference between Internet and the street- and by street i actually mean the safe of the bank, is the ease to steal from the Internet undetected.
Good luck stealing from the bank undetected. You see, they'd have to sneak in and still for example, 0.1cts from random accounts.
Easy electronically. Impossible physically.
The Internet is not nearly as well protected as the physical world AND it doesn't leave traces.
It's like making an analogy to everything + cars. It just doesn't make any sense. Sorry.
I beg to differ:
traceroute gmail.com
tracert gmail.com
EDIT: While the point about SSL is valid, see my post below.
EDIT2: And as stated above, having your passwords plaintext anywhere, espicially in the cloud, isn't ideal.
If you use the web client, everything is over HTTPS, and, like the gp stated, probably goes nowhere beyond the database, although merely a supposition.
My point is, email was not designed to be "secure" (i.e., secret), and is not though that way. Therefore ppl do not work very hard to secure email, and one little band-aid doesn't magically make the whole system "secure".
Your mail could turn up in a log file 5 years from now.
(See: http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2011/08/update-on-a...)
The PKI is now totally broken.
Seems to happen often enough.
(Then again, 2011 seems to have been something of an unlucky year for security professionals. Just ask RSA.)
Besides that, what key would they encrypt it with? Something from your password? What do they do with email you get while not logged in? How do you build a search index? I'm actually building something similar, and even after a lot of effort, there's tons of corner cases that simply cannot be protected, so it seems a reasonable guess that gmail does nothing special to encrypt your data.
[edit to add that once you include oauth in the picture, I think the encryption story starts getting really fuzzy.]
The simple fact is that key material is accessible in RAM, and even if it weren't, the data still must be decrypted at some point, and once the server is compromised, you can likely capture that decrypted data.
That's not to say you shouldn't do it -- it helps prevent accidents like unwiped drives getting out, and might be a reasonably effective obfuscation against some attacks, but it just isn't secure in the same way that real end-to-end encryption can be.