
It is unlikely that built-in email encryption will ever be available in Gmail - wil_I_am_27
https://tutanota.com/blog/posts/gmail-end-to-end-encryption-is-dead/
======
tkfu
> While it is possible to encrypt certain emails in Gmail with GPG, Google can
> still read all email meta-data such as email addresses and subject lines.
> Better use a Gmail alternative that encrypts your entire mailbox and
> contacts automatically.

This is nonsense. Any email service will be able to see the recipients (and
senders) of your messages, because that's how email works. Subject lines too,
again, because that's how email works.

E2E encryption of email is a good thing, GPG is hard. These things have be
true forever.

~~~
alfiedotwtf
This.

Can we please kill the idea of "safe email" forever. Email leaks like a sieve.
In fact, It would be interesting to see if the Carbon Copy (CC:) feature of
email violates GDPR.

~~~
Communitivity
100% agree. I remember a friend who typed in SMTP commands to send his dad a
Christmas email from santa@northpole.com.

There are alternatives, they just haven't caught on as an email replacement.
For example, I suspect the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP)
can do everything email can do, and it supports E2E encryption. XMPP addresses
would still be exposed, as any messaging needs the message routing information
decryptable by the server, but much better that email.

~~~
StavrosK

        > telnet mailserver.com 25
        HELO me
        MAIL FROM: santa@northpole.com
        RCPT TO: friends@dad.com
        DATA
        You've been a good boy.
        Santa
        .

~~~
megous
Syntax error.

~~~
StavrosK
Good call, needs more colons.

------
yuz
This is a promotion article for an end-to-end encrypted mail service called
tutanota. They claim that google abandonment of the mail encryption project
impiles that gmail encryption will necessarily never be available for gmail
users.

------
politelemon
It was dead the moment they put it on Github. Their blog post[1] claimed:

> E2EMail is not a Google product, it’s now a fully community-driven open
> source project, to which passionate security engineers from across the
> industry have already contributed.

But looking at the commit history[2] makes it clear that was not the case at
all.

Although this post is by Tutanota (and I can't tell if Tutanota supports PGP),
Protonmail does support PGP emails.

1: [https://security.googleblog.com/2017/02/e2email-research-
pro...](https://security.googleblog.com/2017/02/e2email-research-project-has-
left-nest_24.html)

2: [https://github.com/e2email-
org/e2email/commits/master](https://github.com/e2email-
org/e2email/commits/master)

~~~
bad_user
All email services selling encrypted email as a service are snake oil in my
opinion.

You won't gain anything more than when using GPG by yourself, except you're
now trusting a third-party app to do it for you, using a non-standard adapter
for allowing IMAP / SMTP apps to still work while at the same time obscuring
the fact that end-to-end encryption will only happen when the recipients
support it as well, which is at most 1% of all recipients you're communicating
with.

------
hannob
I know it's a bit old, but since I read this I cannot possibly take Tutanota
seriously on anything crypto:

[https://tutanota.uservoice.com/forums/237921-general/suggest...](https://tutanota.uservoice.com/forums/237921-general/suggestions/7858974-tutanota-
is-using-unauthenticated-aes-cbc-encrypti)
[https://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2015/Jun/58](https://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2015/Jun/58)

------
Leace
The article has a point but do know that Tutanota is using their own custom
encryption scheme. I can understand they don't want to support PGP if they
have something better but judging from their FAQ [0] they just replicated what
PGP already can do [1] [2] effectively reinventing square wheel.

As for browser encryption Mailvelope [3] works and can even use local GnuPG
(through NativeMessaging). FlowCrypt [4] is a little bit more tightly
integrated with Gmail (through their API).

[0]: [https://tutanota.com/faq/#pgp](https://tutanota.com/faq/#pgp)

[1]: "That's why we have developed a solution that is also based on recognized
algorithms (RSA and AES) and that automatically encrypts the subject, the
content and the attachments."

[2]: [https://github.com/autocrypt/memoryhole#memory-hole-
protecte...](https://github.com/autocrypt/memoryhole#memory-hole-protected-e-
mail-headers)

[3]: [https://www.mailvelope.com/en](https://www.mailvelope.com/en)

[4]: [https://flowcrypt.com/](https://flowcrypt.com/)

~~~
jrochkind1
Hmm. Solutions like signal or whatsapp also used their "own custom encryption
scheme" (in that sense), instead of PGP.

I'm not sure PGP is actually good enough that alternatives aren't desirable.
Here's a Wired article saying "PGP is dead... use Signal for your encrypted
messaging instead": [https://www.wired.co.uk/article/efail-pgp-vulnerability-
outl...](https://www.wired.co.uk/article/efail-pgp-vulnerability-outlook-
thunderbird-smime)

Here's respected cryptographer Matthew Green saying PGP is "a model of email
encryption that’s fundamentally broken" in 2014.
[https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2014/08/13/whats-
ma...](https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2014/08/13/whats-matter-with-
pgp/)

I think there was another more recent "what's the matter with PGP" post I saw
on HN, I found these above while trying to see if I could remember what I saw
more recently.

~~~
Leace
> Solutions like signal or whatsapp also used their "own custom encryption
> scheme" (in that sense), instead of PGP.

But Signal's "own custom encryption scheme" have obvious advantages over PGP,
for example forward secrecy. That's what I meant by "I can understand (...) if
they have something better".

In Tutanota's case judging from their public descriptions the scheme doesn't
have any advantages over PGP as it is currently used.

Implementing custom crypto usually ends up with something like this:
[https://tutanota.uservoice.com/forums/237921-general/suggest...](https://tutanota.uservoice.com/forums/237921-general/suggestions/7858974-tutanota-
is-using-unauthenticated-aes-cbc-encrypti)

~~~
jrochkind1
If you're providing an encryption service and not doing it well, that's
certainly a problem.

There are various levels of "custom". I'm not sure anything that isn't PGP is
"implementing custom crypto" in the same way; you could be using a good crypto
library like NaCL -- or not -- for instance.

But you gotta know what you're doing. With so much critique of PGP though, I'm
not sure "using PGP or not," or suggesting that using PGP is the obvious way
to go, is the right line to be drawing.

But yeah, that link you provide to an issue does not one make confident that
tutanota has the proper staffing to do crypto right.

------
mikekchar
In the meantime I'm using mutt on the desktop on K9 on Android. I have to say
that K9 is brilliant (mutt less so, but I like it ;-)). It's the closest "it
just works" E2E mail client I've ever used. Unfortunately the reality of PGP
is that it's hard for a normal person to use, although I've got my Dad using
it for all of our email.

------
snvzz
We need the Dark Mail Alliance more than ever.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Mail_Alliance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Mail_Alliance)

[https://darkmail.info/downloads/dark-internet-mail-
environme...](https://darkmail.info/downloads/dark-internet-mail-environment-
june-2018.pdf)

[https://github.com/lavabit/](https://github.com/lavabit/)

------
LinuxBender
GPG is hard for some, but 7-zip is easy for most. Not perfect, but perfect is
enemy of good. Just put your email, files, whatever in a 7-zip encrypted and
compressed file and email that.

Tell your friend the password over voice chat, or some other chat that is in
no way related to your mail provider. Even a weak password is better than
trusting the mail provider to handle this job. Here is a 7-zip file with a
very simple password. [1] Please reply with the contents of the text file in
the 7z.

[1] -
[https://tinyvpn.org/5/e/f/5efed61e6efe235d965547999292279e.7...](https://tinyvpn.org/5/e/f/5efed61e6efe235d965547999292279e.7z)

------
stirfrykitty
If all one wants to do is communicate securely with another person and what
your typing is private but not "illegal", then why even send email. Simply use
the Drafts in GMail. Compose an email and leave it in Drafts. Each person
amends the draft and they can agree on times to check and update. This has
been done with great success before if you want nothing "going across the
wire" so to speak.

------
nukeop
Advertisement for tutanota. Just use GPG like everybody who knows what they're
doing.

------
kjar
Mass surveillance is kinda Google’s model

------
jimnutt
So, I'm sure this idea has holes all over it, but how about a very simple
service that you log into with your PGP public key, then would allow you to
post encrypted messages to other PGP public keys and retrieve messages posted
to your public key. It could be fully anonymous, depending on your choice of
keys. It would be very similar to the mixmaster remailers, except it wouldn't
actual mail anything as it wouldn't have any identifiable information other
than the public key.

~~~
dredmorbius
PGP itself leaks a huge amount of metadata. A known problem on open mailing
lists and Usenet.

------
vlastik
Why not something like Let's Encrypt, but for S/MIME?

~~~
rtnl
That's actually what a Swiss startup called Vereign seems to be working on:
[https://medium.com/@ggreve/nobody-cares-about-
signatures-a56...](https://medium.com/@ggreve/nobody-cares-about-
signatures-a56505b8ce04)

------
Causality1
"shows where Google's real interests are: Not in protecting their users'
private data, but in harvesting it for their own benefit."

Well, Duh. That's the deal. "in exchange for this service we will scrape your
data in order to serve ads". If you don't like it go somewhere else. Google
doesn't owe you a free email service.

------
hguhghuff
The problem with Email is that it’s routed, store and forward, whereas there’s
no reason why it shouldnt be point to point.

If you wanted to revolutionize email then you’d create a point to point email
service.

~~~
krageon
There's a reason peer to peer isn't seen as a great idea for messaging and
that reason is it's been tried many, many times and it doesn't work well. For
some people it just won't work well ever. Furthermore, it doesn't mesh with
the expectations most people will have of a mail service (you push the mail
out and it will arrive some day regardless of what you do), which makes it a
bad fit for the use-case to begin with.

------
chiefalchemist
I'm not a fan of email, and not only because of security / privacy. Yes, it's
ubiquitous and convenient; and great for quick simple messages.

But it's not (in a biz / life context) a project management tool. So aside
from "where do you want to go for lunch?" the appropriateness of email breaks
down pretty quick. Unfortunately, the habit and convenience not so much so.

Ideally, we're nudging towards a tipping point where email gets replaced by
more appropriate (planning and proj management) tools - even at the personal
level.

~~~
arbitrage
I'm not a fan of cars, because they don't perform well in lakes. I'm hoping
we're moving toward a world where we use different tools for different tasks.
Something engineered to float would be much better, in my opinion.

~~~
chiefalchemist
Yes! Thank you for proving my point[1]!!

That is, at this point email is the internet equivalent of a fax machine. It's
a hammer (or car) that most are using as a screwdriver (or boat). Factor in
the lack of security / privacy and email should be marginalized, just as the
fax machine was.

[1] Yes, I realize it was not your intent. But the fact is, your analogy is a
good one for the point I'm trying to make.

