Comment on On email privacy: can I store my own email and relay them through an email provider?

• bw42@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Communication between the email servers is normally encrypted with TLS. The email files themselves are rarely encrypted. Most providers that do encryption of email are using local server managed encryption, so the email providers would still be able to access it.

  For proper end to end protection you would want to setup PGP between you and your recipients, and encrypt the email before its sent.

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  • Dropper_Post@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    But like in 2025 there is still no mechanism to do true end to end without manually setting up pgp? Meaning when i browse using https i do not need to think or anything. It happens automagically. But with emails, where do i even start with pgp when i use gmail via email client like thunderbird

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    • markstos@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Https give you encryption in transit. The files you view will be accesible to the host.

      Same idea with email.

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    • bw42@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Yeah, in 2025 doing encrypted email is a painful process. Every option is a hack on top of a 43 year old protocol.

      Here is a howto from Mozilla on pgp with Thunderbird. It isn’t a pleasant process.

      …mozilla.org/…/openpgp-thunderbird-howto-and-faq

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      • InnerScientist@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        Luckely we’re not relying on emails for security relevant and or private information, right?

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    • sxan@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      No.

      Use S/MIME or PGP and directly encrypt emails to your recipient. This is the only E2E encryption available to email.

      The best metaphor for email I’ve found is that you’re writing your message on a postcard and handing it to your neighbor closest to the destination, who hands it to her neighbor, and so on, until it gets there. There are usually fewer hops, but also your email is broken into packets which could go through god knows how many routers, each of which can read your email.

      E2E requires setting up a private key; RFC 821 provided no such mechanism. Your only option is out-of-band negotiation, like PGP.

      There is a good proposal out there that sets mail headed announcing that you accept encrypted emails, and includes information about your ID, which clients could parse and verify against public key servers; it hadn’t really gained a lot of traction, as it causes issues for data harvesters but also at the end user side. Like, how is notmuch and mairix supposed to handle these? They’d need permanent access to your private key to decrypt and index the emails, and then now your index is unencrypted.

      There’s been a fair amount of debate about this, and it’s a lot of work that would need coordinating between teams of volunteers… it hasn’t made much progress because of the complexity, but it’s a nice solution.

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