I am still not convinced by the "encrypt all the SMTP traffic" argument. It adds more encrypted traffic, but these mails are still decrypted on the mail servers to inspect them and then to forward them again.
Worse still, most mail servers and programs have no checks whatsoever regarding certificates of other mail servers or clients. As long as it is able to crypt and decrypt, it's acceptable. If you're lucky there is some sensible admin who restricts algorithms.
I'm still worried that this adds too much false sense of security as it is right now.
There will always be misconfigurations, so we will always need ways to detect and handle them.
Encrypting everything everywhere increases the cost of snooping, which is good. It's a long way from perfect, but that shouldn't stop us from making an improvement.
Comments
I am still not convinced by the "encrypt all the SMTP traffic" argument. It adds more encrypted traffic, but these mails are still decrypted on the mail servers to inspect them and then to forward them again.
Worse still, most mail servers and programs have no checks whatsoever regarding certificates of other mail servers or clients. As long as it is able to crypt and decrypt, it's acceptable. If you're lucky there is some sensible admin who restricts algorithms.
I'm still worried that this adds too much false sense of security as it is right now.
There will always be misconfigurations, so we will always need ways to detect and handle them.
Encrypting everything everywhere increases the cost of snooping, which is good. It's a long way from perfect, but that shouldn't stop us from making an improvement.
You are not encrypting everything everywhere.
It is putting things in a different envelope for each hop you are doing in the post.
Yes, it is secured in transit, but there is no way that you can verify that everything went securely.
Sure. But the point stands: it makes snooping more expensive. Is it perfect? No. Is it better than nothing? Yes.