At 12:41 PM 11/02/2002 -0500, Steve Furlong wrote:

The only business environment I've ever worked in which successfully used encrypted email mandated specific versions of mail client (Outlook, ecch) and PGP (integrated into Outlook), had a jackbooted thug to make sure everyone's keyring was up to date, and had a fairly small (couple dozen), mostly technically proficient, user base. And even there, half the time the encrypted message wasn't sensitive enough to be worth encrypting nor important enough to be worth decrypting.

All of the business email I send from home is encrypted - not by the mail user agent or mail transfer agent, but by the VPN I use to reach my work intranet. If it goes outside the company, it's normally not encrypted. (Also, non-business email I send when VPN-connected is encrypted, on the dialup portions, but not past that.) What would be really nice, and would encrypt a large chunk of the US's business email, would be for MS Exchange / Outlook mail servers to adopt STARTTLS for their SMTP services.