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