Hacker News Reader

Comment by rlpb | Hacker News Reader

> When the recipient is a Gmail user (enterprise or personal), Gmail sends an E2EE email. The email is automatically decrypted in the recipient's inbox, and the recipient can use Gmail in a familiar way.

So what happens with Search?

View on HN

Random unpolished idea: a (local) search engine that runs when seeing the email and stores the keywords encrypted in its index..

So if you're looking for "Nigerian prince" it will look up "Avtrevna cevapr" and return references to the emails containing that term.

Is that an April fools joke? Proper encryption suites don't produce something that looks like a Caesar cipher, it's just a solid block of seemingly random data. You can't really index something like the words inside an email unless you first decrypt it.

Reading all parts of

https://esl.cs.brown.edu/blog/how-to-search-on-encrypted-dat...

might allow for some options to solve this problem.

Right, I do understand that with some setup involved, there are ways to search against encrypted messages but simply being given a brand new chunk of encrypted data with no prior knowledge of the contents would be impossible for anyone to index other than the recipient using the key. There would definitely be a way for the client-side to automatically download an encrypted email, decrypt it, index it, and keep an index database using whatever method while simultaneously keeping the originally encrypted email secure on the server.

ProtonMail downloads the whole mailbox to browser storage to support fulltext search.

Whew!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com