Whenever I see a thread about the security of email these days, I think we're missing the point by a large margin.<p>Yes, email is insecure. It is not possible for a company like Silent Circle to provide perfect security for email, therefore it was a wise move to drop it. However, the average person should want to prevent large scale/dragnet surveillance of the entire population and themselves, rather than aim for perfect security.<p>The problem we have now is that email is very easily trackable <i>because everyone is using the same two email providers</i>. All the NSA has to do is get their hands on Gmail, and 50% of the people who use email will have it compromised (since they only need to get one side to read the other, too).<p>We have an email server monoculture. If everyone started using their own mail server (with TLS enabled), large-scale tracking people would be much, much harder. There's not much people can do if they're specifically tracked, anyway, so using your own email server gets you all the convenience with <i>a lot</i> more security.<p>I think the best thing to do now would be to create a mail server package that someone can deploy with one command. "docker run whatever/mail", for example, to get you a TLS-enabled server, configured properly to stop spam attempts, etc. We don't need to use GPG to make large-scale surveillance harder, we just need to use more email servers.