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.
bw42@lemmy.world 1 week 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
InnerScientist@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Luckely we’re not relying on emails for security relevant and or private information, right?