I guess I’m trying to understand in case my experience isn’t representative.
As an individual, almost every person I know uses Gmail or possibly outlook.com. They’ve never heard of PGP, much less ever set it up. Similarly, proton/tuta emails will also arrive unencrypted. From a practical standpoint, it’s much easier to get personal contacts to use Signal or another e2ee messenger instead, which is better for privacy anyway.
I also rarely send emails using my personal email account, especially since messaging apps started to dominate communications 15+ years ago. The only times I send an email now is when I’m trying to communicate with a business. And just like before, businesses will not implement PGP. Businesses almost all rely on services and clients that don’t support PGP anyway.
Most businesses also have rules against customers sending encrypted emails anyway due to overextended security concerns. I’ve tried sending password protected emails and they just refuse to open it and say they have rules against navigating to external links. Their arbitrary rules always take precedence over my privacy and security desires.
Not a single business I’ve interacted with cares about email encryption. The only ones that do are the ones that are legally required to, such as healthcare institutions. But these places have instead created patient portals to bypass email. Smaller practice healthcare professionals still don’t care and are largely ignorant about HIPAA data privacy rules, which are almost never enforced against them anyway.
I can imagine a business or organization using encrypted email more often for intra-organization emails. But then again, Proton struggles to attract these types of customers and most of them will use Google or Microsoft enterprise products anyway.
I never send or receive encrypted email. I have both Proton and Tuta accounts but once the current subscriptions end I’ll let it lapse and just keep the free tier. I’ve mostly been using SimpleLogin aliases and a Runbox email account (which isn’t E2EE but is encrypted with their keys at rest).
I’ve had a bit more luck getting a few friends to use Signal.
With regards to PGP, rarely, unfortunately. The only times were in email exchanges with like minded folks, other than that,… not much comes to my mind tbh.
However, I’ve had significantly more success using S/MIME. It’s not equivalent to PGP (trust models differ) but it’s e2e nonetheless.
Does this question include this type of encryption? If so, then I send or receive this in a business setting quite often. More often than not I am the recipient of the item where the individual has enabled it before sending.
Not daily, but some type of email more than once per week with encryption enabled.
I can’t exactly ask a technically illiterate friend or family member to start using mailvelope just to read to my emails, though.
“Let me show you how to upload my key into the program you’re already using that doesn’t require any extensions” is as far as I can go with these things.
That or password encrypted emails, which I wouldn’t inflict on anyone unless it were truly sensitive information that I could only send in an email for some reason.
Also, S/MIME is “real” encryption. Maybe I should consider it if it gets more usage like people are saying.
I’m not familiar with the others besides TLS. TLS is just for transit and may be decrypted at some point during transit. No emails should be going without TLS nowadays since otherwise it’s visible to everyone who sees it during transit.
Almost no one. I have one friend with a Proton account, but anyone who cares enough to use Proton will use Signal so we just use that.
Companies just wouldn’t use it unless they explicitly care about privacy, like Techlore or Sam Bent. Most are much more focused on value productivity and suite integration.
Every company I’ve ever worked for uses Outlook.
Manual PGP? Forget about it. Maybe journalists and dissidents.
I started to use encrypted emails in 1995 with MIT’s MacPGP 2.6.2 and stopped using OpenPGP long ago, in favor of yubicrypt and MicroCrypt, which are both aimed at elderly, non-tech, or people with a disability, to help spreading the use of encrypted messages, without relying on third-parties encryption methods.
The nice thing about MicroCrypt is that you can easily communicate with it on a smartphone, while using a Messenger and need only to exchange your password with your parents or grand-parents, who probably have never used encryption before.
Let’s be honest here, 99% of the population isn’t even aware that normal emails are not encrypted. You can blame all the companies for not educating the users. And the companies should be encrypting the emails and not bothering the users, which comes down to the core of the issue: companies do not want you to encrypt your emails.
Every small step is a step forward. With proton/tuta, every email sent to yourself is encrypted. Our role is to expand knowledge and be ambassadors of encryption. I push all people around me to swap to encryption.
or equivalent of their desktop (usually it would be windows)
All of the support WKD which as long as you submit the key it should be able to automatically encrypt, or if you send the public key hopefully like proton does it automatically applies. that’s what’s accessibility about, minimal effort from the user, set up once and let it do its thing.
Im still not certain that I can pull off PGP email properly doe, not for me but for others, we’ll see
There is absolutely no reason to replace MicroCrypt with Kryptos, as Kryptos is not cross-platform and regarding OpenPGP apps, like GPG4Win etc., they leave traces (while also producing metadata) on your devices and you leave your social graph with them, once third-parties gained access to your device, while MicroCrypt and yubicrypt leaves no traces, compared to OpenPGP, except that one can find names in named pub-key files. like Bob, Alice and Carol without an attached email address, as in an OpenPGP UID, and OpenPGP does not have the very important message padding.
So in > 2026 please do us all a favor and do no longer recommend very old and outdated OpenPGP, which is only intended for nerds and not mature adults.
literally everyone i know uses gmail or hotmail, some are slightly more concerned about privacy than others but none care enough to use a private email provider/pgp.
i might switch back to icloud mail or disroot because of this. these days i only use email to sign up to websites anyways so its not like i need a lot of privacy
You made the point about “Being accessible down to elderly”, Using another app instead of one that’s setup once and forget and well integrated is not “Being accessible on the elderly level”, If you did not mention these words I would not object but they dont go in the same sentence. The whole point of Windows GnuPG is to intergrate with Outlook, you’re not convincing an old person to use a seperate app just to email or talk to you, Kryptos is also meant to overlay the encrypted text into decrypted form which makes for a far more accessible usage than what you just proposed. I also looked at PGPony, it does alot right to make it more acessible than your solution like QR Key exchange, Using on-card key generation for example and has the same Hardware key support as the yubicrypt and its not limited to yubikey. Maybe do your research before insisting…
Don’t play the “I know what im saying, I’m never wrong you are” victim card here
