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When people have to choose between usability, accessibility, and reliability VS security and privacy they almost always choose the former. My response to this would be "Why do self-respecting open source and security advocates refuse to do the hard work of making security and privacy easily available to everyone?"

<IMHO>Laziness, disinterest, and fear of killing off lucrative security consulting.</IMHO>

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There's no privacy in either case. Every single email passes in clear text through some ISP who may very well be storing copies of them. If you want privacy, you use PGP.

That's what I'm getting at. Have you tried using GPG? Most "security" products (or projects) have terrible usability.

Disclaimer: I work on a "security" product.

Usability isn't a great concern to me ;) I used GPG with Alpine. I stopped when my key expired without every having sent a single encrypted email.

"Usability" is ill-defined. GPG seems to have pretty good "usability" from mutt (which auto signs outgoing email and optionally encrypts with a keypress). Maybe your MUA is broken or you forgot to RTFM.

Usability (as I've employed it) is when someone non-technical can derive benefit from something beyond their understanding. Rest assured I've read every line of the GPG man page and then some.

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