We don't need encrypted email so much, we need decentralized email servers with TLS enabled. I have half a mind to launch a service that will take a root password of a newly-created cloud server you own, set up a properly-configured IMAP and SMTP server and hand you the keys.<p>I am of the opinion that that will do more about email privacy than GPG (as long as you trust your hosting provider, at least).
I was thinking about a system that combined these three properties:<p><pre><code> + Anonymous
+ Distributed
+ Encrypted
</code></pre>
For anonymous, I was thinking that the service would be accessible only through Tor or i2p, so that neither the sender nor the receiver can be found out by tracing the message.<p>For distributed, I was thinking that the mail system would essentially be a freesites-style distributed hash table where the mail address (or a hash thereof) would act as the key. The mail or parts of the mail would be stored multiple times across many clients to eliminate single points of failure. Perhaps a TTL system would prevent old mails from filling up everyone's space.<p>Finally, the encrypted would be achieved by having the mail address act as the public key (or at least, the mail address is a key to a distributed KV store that contains the public key). This way, before anonymously sending the message to the various distributed hash table buckets, it gets encrypted so only the desired recipient can read it.<p>It seems like it should be possible to build this from already existing technologies without <i>thaaaat</i> much trouble, though I haven't actually done anything about it.<p>Of course, getting people to use this would be another story ;-) and I guess people would want contacts lists, archives and so on.
It will be hard to make Mailpile user-friendly when you have to install it yourself on your own cloud server. But particularly with the end of free Google Apps accounts, I wonder if there is an opportunity here, either as something end-users can install themselves <i>or</i> as something mom-and-pop shared hosting companies can offer instead of their current always-awful webmail. Maybe you could even build a business around an encrypted webmail tool you license to shared hosting providers.<p>If Mailpile or someone else is going to be self-installed, I'd love to see it built as PHP. (Looks like Python right now.) As much as I refuse to develop in PHP, that seems like the only way to make installation as easy and ubiquitous as Wordpress, which should be the goal.<p>(I realize that either Mailpile or my own suggestion---or anything hosted on someone else's hardware---is vulnerable to someone reading the data right out of RAM, but it seems like their goal is to evade snooping not by building a 100% secure system, but by making it easy and affordable for everyone to have their own email server, so that government surveillance has too many targets to be practical.)
"Public Understanding of Science" has been a big issue for several decades (maybe even longer?), but I think we'll see progress towards "Public Understand of Cryptography," or at least I hope so :)<p>It goes deeper than just using some PGP client. You need to understand how it works, to be sure that the bits coming out of your network are encrypted, and only you and Alice know how to decrypt them.