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Ask HN: Is there an encrypted email client that just works?

2 points by MichaelZuo ↗ HN
My bar for ‘just works’ is that max 5 minutes of fiddling around should be sufficient to get it setup. (and no more than 1 minute of fiddling after each update/change of settings)

Bonus points if it can gracefully fall back to being a regular email client, when needed, without having to click more than a few buttons.

It can be for any major platform, iOS, android, Windows, Linux, Mac, etc…

I would appreciate any suggestions no matter how obscure.

5 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 26.7 ms ] thread
gregjor
Both the sender and receiver need to share a secret or key to encrypt and decrypt. All of the major email services already support encryption (S/MIME), including Outlook, GMail, iOS Mail, Proton, etc. PGP encrypted email has been available for a long time. The problem is sharing the decryption key with the recipient, which makes encrypted email impractical except for communicating with specific individuals.
MichaelZuo
I understand that the key has to be known ahead of time, but all the popular clients just don't support it correctly. For example Mail on iOS makes it very cumbersome.
gregjor
People rarely use encryption for email so it's not a top-level feature. If you want to communicate securely with someone use Signal or WhatsApp -- email is the wrong medium. You could send encrypted paper mail too, but that would be equally cumbersome. Choose a medium and tools that already support encryption. It's a bad fit for email, and so got relegated to the obscure settings because almost no one will use it.
MichaelZuo
Yes I agree the popular email clients are as you say, hence why I made the post...
flaptrap
Yes, the sender needs the recipient's public key. I did not find any service supporting this. Even Proton Mail (https://proton.me/support/password-protected-emails) writes, "To read the message, they must enter a previously agreed-upon password." Thus, the sender sends cleartext to the email provider, hehe.