Email is unsafe and cannot be made safe. The tools we have today to encrypt
email are badly flawed. Even if those flaws were fixed, email would remain
unsafe. Its problems cannot plausibly be mitigated. Avoid encrypted email.
Technologists hate this argument. Few of them specialize in cryptography or
privacy, but all of them are interested in it, and many of them tinker with
encrypted email tools.
Most email encryption on the Internet is performative, done as a status signal
or show of solidarity. Ordinary people don’t exchange email messages that any
powerful adversary would bother to read, and for those people, encrypted email
is LARP security. It doesn’t matter
whether or not these emails are safe, which is why they’re encrypted so
shoddily.