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Comment by waynecochran | Hacker News Reader

Why we are not all using email encryption and digital signatures is beyond me.

Worked on projects dealing with digitally signed/encrypted email. The main technical hurdles I always found were around key management:

1. How do you discover someone's encrypting key? There is no simple way and it involves understanding how it all works. Solutions using the DNS were proposed but never really workable or saw wide deployment (I tried). Gets more complex when someone updates keys.

2. Multi-device - not only do I have to mange keys, but now I have to make sure I have the same keys on my laptop mail agent and phone. That sucks. Using a web client also complicates this.

and a non-technical issue:

3. Large email provides and specialized service found things that sorta work enough. Every bank/medical office has a "secure messaging portal" that you can use that aren't as simple as email, but works well enough that there is no pressure to move to more standard email. Large providers like Microsoft have internal solutions to send secure email that works in their service and if it is free to get an account, it works (even if it's annoying).

     1. How do you discover someone's encrypting key?

They give it (the public key) to you or publish it where everyone can find it. You would keep and verify all your friends, colleagues, businesses, etc email..

These are all solvable problems. Much like voting. Someone does not want these problems solved.

How do you solve the problem of needing to pass an email address via phone? Happened to me dozens of times over the last year. Also, how do you solve the problem of shared inboxes where employees need to access emails and they may get replaced over time? How do you solve the problem of people just straight up losing or breaking their keys/laptops/phones? I knew people who had a new phone every few months because something happened to it.

The average user is very, very far away from being able to use a nearly irreplacible item for communication. And yes, it's irreplacible since there is no rollover mechanism in just publishing the public key.

> Someone does not want these problems solved.

I don't think it's a conspiracy; I think the people who don't want these problems solved are typical email users, for whom the increased security would only increase complexity without solving any actual problems they have with email.

All email users deal with the tyranny of email. They are just used to it. They don’t know how much better it could be.

I don't think that adding end-to-end encryption would make things meaningfully better for most of the people who use email.

Digital signatures would. Makes it real easy to sort your email.

If proton mail can do it so can everyone else. The ad-tech companies clearly don't want to.

Because it simply isn't ergonomic and the people who could do something about it don't care.

For instance, people were told to use sub-keys instead of their master key. When Thunderbird integrated PGP (effectively deprecating enigmail), sub-keys were not supported for a long time (are they now?). Thunderbird devs didn't really care that they just broke multiple people's workflow. That's how you butcher adoption.

I was pretty upset by this. It looks like it's still broken [1]. I stayed with the older version of Thunderbird for a while and recently upgraded by following their smartcard guide and it worked. I ran into some troubles that were resolved by installing a 32-bit version of Thunderbird. The issue was with GPGME, not clear to me whether it's a 64-bit library.

I got decryption and signing working with my Yubikey. Enigmail is still missed.

"Can I use an OpenPGP smartcard or a hardware token with Thunderbird 78?

Yes, we offer an optional mechanism. It requires that you install GnuPG and all required software yourself. Please refer to this document for more details: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:OpenPGP:Smartcards"

It just blows my mind they gimped a feature so bad and after so many years still havn't reached parity.

[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/openpgp-thunderbird-how...

I wager because of Google. They have have positioned themselves to see the majority of e-mails and can't allow E2EE.

Email encryption is badly broken and cannot be fixed. It shouldn't be encouraged, users should migrate to a ratchet encrypted messaging service that doesn't have a million different gotchas and potential side-channels for exfiltrating messages.

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