Hacker News Reader

This would be amazing if Google use anything like an open standard for their cryptography, so that anyone can write and use interoperable mail client plugins, or use GPG to talk to gmail users e2ee. Why am I haunted by the suspicion that won't be the case?

View on HN

It's using S/MIME

https://support.google.com/a/answer/13069736?visit_id=638068...

That opens it right up. Pleased to be wrong in my suspicion. I see that it's possible to configure Mutt [1] and Gnus [2] with SMIME. Perhaps 2023 will finally be the year of encrypted email.

[1] https://wiki.netbsd.org/users/wiz/mutt-smime/

[2] https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GnusSMIME

I wouldn't get too excited. This only seems to be the addition of S/MIME client capability for Google corporate email customers. So the Google corporate customer will still have to procure, renew and pay for a S/MIME certificate for each and every employee. That isn't something that companies have shown much interest in up to this point.

This does not affect non-corporate Gmail users...

This is also cool because unlike a lot of other end to end systems you don't have to trust the client they provided you with.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com