All tech geeks set up mail servers with encryption and volunteer to migrate their non-tech friends and family to new email homes. We also show how to configure encryption in their mail clients and start getting them to use native email clients rather than webmail.
This will have two effects. It will send a message to Google/Microsoft/Yahoo!/insert big mail provider here/... that they have been lax in protecting the privacy and interests of their users. Of course, given the free-as-in-beer model of webmail it was long apparent to some that the user was actually the product and the advertiser was the actual customer. If a user is seen as a mere data-point then there is little incentive to assure these mere data-points privacy. maybe this will be the kick in the pants the big providers need. Maybe that model is irredeemably broken and always has been but we just didn't know it yet.
Email should be like snail mail. Everybody acts as their own mail server and mail client in snail mail land. Your inbox is the physical letterbox and you would never let some corporation provide that value in return for some dubious positive (convenience? a nice interface to your mail store? the ability to search your mail store? ...)
The second effect is that it sends a message to the spooks and claws back a vital channel of our privacy. We can work on safe and easy anonymous browsing and safe and anonymous and federated social networking and whatever else further down the road -- mail needs to come first.
Think about it. There are enough tech geeks. Every geek should need to know how to do this anyhow. This will scale. We need to build a movement around this. When something in the political arena forces the immeasurably invaluable Groklaw offline something tangible needs to be done. We have had a series of ever more alarming wake-up calls (though I hate how clichéd that sounds) since the first Snowden revelations. We need to start acting on these calls. Sure our response needs a political dimension (a global moratorium on digital mass surveillance) as well but I think that this technical part-solution has got legs.
What do you think?