Will these emails be more secure?

  • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
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    1 year ago

    No. Gmail scans all messages as they come in, so if there’s anything secret in there it’s too late already.

    You can enable PGP to encrypt messages for free, but that only protects your email when the receiving end also enables PGP and has given you their public key beforehand and marked them as sufficiently trusted.

    If your recipient has an S/MIME certificate, you can use that to encrypt messages. These certificates cost money, though. Again you’ll need their public key, but you don’t need to mess with any webs of trust.

    Email encryption is a pain in the ass to use securely. If you want to share messages safely, use Signal or another secure messenger. Even WhatsApp is more secure than standard email.

    • dbx12@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      Technically you still have a web of trust with S/MIME. You just don’t say “I trust you because X said you’re good and I trust X” but you say “I trust you, because you paid X money and X did probably a good background check on you”. So rather a tree than a web.

      I guess it is philosophical to argue if a tree can be considered a net as well.

      • Very true, but with S/MIME you have the advantage of not needing to maintain that stuff yourself. Both PGP and S/MIME have huge impersonation risks in theory, but in practice S/MIME is just the expensive, corporate PGP that normal people can actually use for their business email.

        • dbx12@programming.dev
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          1 year ago

          Basically Let’s encrypt and geotrust certificates :D

          Oooh, something like let’s encrypt but for mails would be nice