I wish the client stored it decrypted once received.
Me too. I already have my systems with fulldisk encryption, I need the communication to be end encrypted.
Email clients (like Thunderbird) keeping emails stored encrypted, just makes it harder for these tools to search, label and automate stuff around content.
No one is innocent. I refuse to use LE and operate my own CA instead, and as a consequence of scareware browser warnings I publish http: links instead of https: (if anyone cares, you know to add the "s" don't you?). I run my own mailserver which opportunistically encrypts, and at least when it gets to me it's on hardware which I own and somebody needs a search warrant to access.. as opposed to y'all and your gmail accounts. I do have a PGP key, but I don't include it on the first email with every new correspondent because too many times it's been flagged as a "virus" or "malicious".
Clearly we live in a world only barely removed from crystals and ouija boards.
You're merely defining away the problem. You have no idea what was in those emails.
We call this the "scream test" in BOFH land.
You’ve also got no idea what was in those emails. Could be some valuable knowledge or logs about some crazy rare bug or scenario, and would be useful to review today.
We just turned on S/MIME by default, to “be secure”, whatever that means. There was no warning in the email client about losing access to the email if you lost your keys.
Citing BOFH is all well and good inside certain circles. In the real world, people don’t like spending time or effort on poorly thought out and implemented solutions.
IOW: who owns the backups owns the data... until proven otherwise. My default presumption from space is that 1) there are document management policies and 2) document management policies apply.