Why Not Store Encrypted Emails in Plaintext Locally? (lemm.ee)

submitted 1 year ago by spookedbyroaches@lemm.ee to c/privacyguides@lemmy.one

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Clients like Thunderbird are great because you have everything stored locally so you can easily search offline. They also support encrypting and decrypting emails in PGP. However, they seem to have the same limitation as protonmail where you can't search through encrypted emails.

I know that protonmail can't just store your key at their server since that would defeat the purpose, so the emails are all ciphertext to them right? But in Thunderbird, you already have the key and decrypt everything all the time. So why can't you skip the middleman in your local machine and store everything locally in plaintext? It's not less secure since if your local machine is compromised, your private key is also compromised.

Or at the very least give us the option and have a slightly less secure but much more convenient option.

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[-] ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago

Protonmail now supports searching in the content of all your mail, though.
Or at least the web client. It will ask you to download all your mail, and it will make an encrypted search index on your computer.

[-] spookedbyroaches@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago

That's cool but I like to have a central client for all my email providers. I've decided to go to fastmail which is good enough for my threat model. The thing that really convinced me is their blog post.

The main thing I care about is the security of the text in transit, and the philosophy of the service I'm using. All respectable mail providers use TLS (even gmail and outlook) but I don't like their advertiser dependent business model. Proton, tutanota, and I think startmail do respect privacy, but I believe it's dumb to depend on an external server if you're that paranoid about your communications that you need to have your email using PGP. Just encrypt your own stuff and tell the other party to do the same. Or self host everything.

[-] ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

fastmail

That's a paid service, right? I don't know much about them, they may have other pros too, but proton also allows you to use your own email client if you're in a plan.

this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2023

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