All emails I have ever sent were sent as plain text. Like postcards, everybody on the way to the addressee could easily read and store them. This worries me. I know privacy is something of the past, but encrypting email is possible, at least in theory. However, I wonder whether it is practical enough.
Is there anybody who has experience with email security? Is it easy to set up? And can you still send and receive email from all you friends and acquaintances?
Best Answer
Very unfortunately: No.
Mail encryption usually means public key encryption. This involves the recipient to have a public key published somewhere - this can be used to encrypt emails. That key then has a secret pair - a private key that can be used to decrypt the emails.
For mail encryption to be practical, the email client would have to be able to:
But the bigger problem here is the infrastructure. For this to happen, there would have to be:
Another problem is that most email clients would have to be able to handle the decryption, and most email providers would have to provide the key service, for the system to be effective. Encryption needs full support at both ends of the communication. But I don't see this as that big of an issue. If an easy and practical standard appears on some clients and servers, they could advertise "we support the secure email standard", and others would probably follow suit.
Also the user would have to be notified about whether a public key is available for the recipient. A good approach would be when adding a recipient, showing a common secure symbol, like the padlock or the blue glow used in SSL/TLS connections with web browsers.
Of course, an alternate private key server, or even just a key file, could be configured to the email client so that the more paranoid user could store his/her own keys wherever he wants. For the rest of us, the email provider could still read the emails as they store the private key - but this would still make communications very secure. After all, security is often about who we can trust.
Honestly, I really don't know why this hasn't happened yet. It's not that complicated. Get on with it already!