Phillip H-B, et al have been saying... [email encryption, etc] What is the gap we have to close to turn this on by default?
How many times has this been rehashed the last six months? You can't fix email as we know it today using todays bolt-ons, protocols and corporate stakeholders/services trying to profit from it. The only way to have any real global seamless success is to go ground up with a completely new model. IMO, that will be some form of p2p message system where every address is a crypto key, masked for grandma by her contact list, decrypted out your p2p daemon and piped into your local mail processing (MUA/filter/lists) and filesystem (encryption). At least that way your local mail tools will still work (no one will give those up anyway).
The problem is the antique centralized backend, it needs bypassed. You've got neat stuff like Tor, bittorrent, bitcoin, etc already... so boost email into the 2020's the same way. Then let the old world email services try to keep up, and slowly die like everything else.
/ There are people I know who do not mind the extra steps for pgp. I / certainly want to get the roll out to use and test and enjoy. Sign me / up. Encryption is only part of it. There's transport, elimination of central storage, anonymity, p2p, etc. Many things people want simply can't be done with modifications to the current system. With p2p model and every node as a key/address, you don't need 'pgp' because the node is the key and does lookups and encrypt2dest / decrypt2you for you. But you can still use pgp with the usual tools around message bodies if desired for additional encrypt/auth or if you're disk isn't encrypted. P2P daemon takes over and all the old transport headers go away. Spam/AV becomes another local daemon. Mailing lists are a repeater node someone runs, or the usual local mailman stuff. It's a transport replacement, so business can use it account@node. All the MTA's die off in time. [Please direct list replies to the list, not me. I should have broke the subject earlier.]