As someone who has read plenty of discussions about email security (some of them in this very community), including all kind of stuff (from the company groupie to tinfoil-hat conspiracy theories), I have decided to put too many hours some time to discuss the different threat models for email setups, including the basic most people have, the “secure email provider” one (e.g., Protonmail) and the “I use arch PGP manually BTW”.
Jokes aside, I hope that it provides an overview comprehensive and - I don’t want to say objective, but at least rational - enough so that everyone can draw their own conclusion, while also showing how certain “radical” arguments that I have seen in the past are relatively shortsighted.
The tl;dr is that email is generally not a great solution when talking about security. Depending on your risk profile, using a secure email provider may be the best compromise between realistic security and usability, while if you really have serious security needs, you probably shouldn’t use emails, but if you do then a custom setup is your best choice.
Cheers
Yep, I am aware of the contradiction. I used to, but since then I moved to an alias as it was not worth wasting a domain for a single address. I may spend eventually the time to setup PGP for the alias itself, but I just didn’t. It’s a Proton alias, so I get anyway PGP encryption, though (obviously without all the features, but good enough for the near-zero volume I currently have).
That’s only true if you’re talking to other Proton users. Proton does encrypt emails at rest, but that’s basically the same as TLS + trusted server. Whether they use PGP on the BE or not is irrelevant.
Publishing your PGP public key next to your email doesn’t require “wasting a domain” or anything like that, it merely gives others an option to contact you w/ PGP encryption. Since you already get near-zero volume, you probably would get even nearer-zero PGP volume (the few that would email you probably won’t bother using your PGP key), but it would at least show that you’re open to E2EE. You can even generate a special key that’s only used publicly, and Proton should handle decryption automatically for you.
Anyway, I’m part of that group that probably wouldn’t bother using your PGP key anyway, I just thought it was amusing that you didn’t seem to actually follow your own advice. Perhaps that’s just more evidence that email should simply be avoided.