I also considered the approach of transparently encrypting all incoming mail with the user's public key, but it has a couple of downsides, mainly:
* This only works if all of a user's clients support GPG. I'm looking for a solution that would work for any average Joe (on his desktop, phone and tablet) rather than a solution geared towards technical people.
* This process only encrypts the email's body, and not the metadata (from, to, subject, headers containing IP addresses, etc). As a bunch of people have shown after the PRISM fallout, analysis on metadata alone can reveal an incredible amount of private information.
* It would be impossible to support features such as server-side search, effectively making email search on your mobile devices impossible.
Of course any solution to this problem will be a compromise between security and usability, so let's hope a number of different solutions will see the light of day, so that everyone can choose the solution that works the best for them.
Nice, yes, thanks the reply, agree with everything.
> This process only encrypts the email's body, and not the metadata (from, to, subject, headers containing IP addresses, etc). As a bunch of people have shown after the PRISM fallout, analysis on metadata alone can reveal an incredible amount of private information.
I also had the idea to have encrypted containers something akin to what you are proposing, with PGP for the body underneath. It gets complicated..
Anyway,
> Of course any solution to this problem will be a compromise between security and usability, so let's hope a number of different solutions will see the light of day, so that everyone can choose the solution that works the best for them.
I very much agree. Here's to hoping to see multiple solutions soon :)
* This only works if all of a user's clients support GPG. I'm looking for a solution that would work for any average Joe (on his desktop, phone and tablet) rather than a solution geared towards technical people.
* This process only encrypts the email's body, and not the metadata (from, to, subject, headers containing IP addresses, etc). As a bunch of people have shown after the PRISM fallout, analysis on metadata alone can reveal an incredible amount of private information.
* It would be impossible to support features such as server-side search, effectively making email search on your mobile devices impossible.
Of course any solution to this problem will be a compromise between security and usability, so let's hope a number of different solutions will see the light of day, so that everyone can choose the solution that works the best for them.