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Yes, because there is no reason to believe that the german government has any interest in the active surveillance of digital communications.

/* sarcasm */

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It's better to be subject to just your government instead of both your government and the self-proclaimed world police. The US terror machine needs to be avoided at all costs as it's the greatest threat to peace and freedom worldwide.

I am not saying that this specific service is good for the privacy of their users. I am saying that this move, phasing out non-SSL email, will _force_ the rest of the world to add SSL to outgoing email connections, thereby protecting all email worldwide from passive interception.

Right now, I think about 75% of email traffic is encrypted between sender and recipient, so this would protect that remaining 25%. (Percentages _greatly_ dependent on who and where you measure.)

I agree with that view. I think this is largely a bit of opportunist advertising, but also that this specific measure is actually useful. Like with more companies moving towards HTTPS-by-default, it's useful in cutting down the number of places where things can be easily intercepted. Even cutting down the number of places where non-government parties can intercept something is useful, because: 1) that's in itself good for privacy; and 2) non-government parties are a major source of government information, because some of them voluntarily turn over or sell the information to governments, and others end up being forced to hand it over.

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