I thought this title was a reference to this David Bowie/NIN song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LT3cERVRoQo

Issue 1: Establishing lots of reasons why people should encrypt

Issue 2: Making it easy to encrypt

Issue 3: Popularizing encryption or getting more people to do it

If you want encrypted communication over email, there's DeltaChat.

It's weird. Almost all web traffic is now https - even though very little of it is sensitive. Email, on the other hand, is quite often sensitive, and yet...no one cares.

Why?

Someone needs to design a super dumb and robust system where I can safely store all my keys on all devices I use an account. The fact that whatsapp, signal and other platforms tend to have a primary device for keys is bonkers to me. A primary device that can randomly die, get stolen or fall in a lake.

I have lost chat histories more times than I can remember, and I have to be extra diligent about this these days.

I don’t even want to think about pgp when I have to manually take care of this problem. Not because of my own skills, but because I could never make it reliable for my family and friends on their side.

Maybe Johnny doesn't have a need to encrypt. The post card in India was just a card with message written on both sides, fully visible in plain text. It's very common that a postman would read out the letter to recipients sometimes, when they deliver it. Privacy is not an universal need.

Poor are those people who are forced to hide their message in encrypted formats,

> Proton is a notable exception.

Proton doesn't provide public APIs for retrieving the public GPG keys associated with their users' accounts, nor do they provide a way to send encrypted mail to their users' accounts without using their official apps.

Ergo, Proton is not really working to further the state of cryptography for email, they're only working to compel users to use their proprietary software (and ultimately their paid services).

If services which do automated sending of emails to their subscribers/users have no way to encrypt those emails for its users who are on proton mail, I don't understand how Proton can claim to care about encryption.

I consider e-mails to be digital versions of postcards. Both are obsolete but have some usage scenarios. There is no need to use private communication in obsolete postcard type messaging, so there is no need for encryption. For private communications there are other better(easier) means which people use.