Google’s Ease-of-Use Email Encryption Project E2Email Goes Open Source
It looks like Google have been attempting to tackle a longstanding bug-bear of many people, the un-intuitive nature of personal email encryption.
I conceptually at least, really like PGP and have made a few attempts to get my social circle (some of whom might have the chops to hack it, so to speak) to adopt, but aside from spurious commentary about the why, it’s usually the lack of simple ‘just works‘ tools which have let me down.
There has been a bit of noise, for example:
- http://www.darkreading.com/endpoint/privacy/googles-ease-of-use-email-encryption-project-goes-open-source/d/d-id/1328277
- https://security.googleblog.com/2017/02/e2email-research-project-has-left-nest_24.html
about the E2Email project which promises a simple Chrome application, an easy to use (hopefully) Gmail client that exchanges OpenPGP mail.
I know it’s not pure GnuPG or PGP, but all the same this is quite an interesting development from Google and seems like maybe finally some weight in the ring in attempting to improve usability of email encryption.
I haven’t set up a build of this repo yet, so I’ll be interested to see what happens, and how useable it is in current form.
If you’re interested in encryption facilities inside Gmail, this could be worth following.
Rob Thatcher 