I just want to disagree with what I think is a false dichotomy that you presented. On 02/08/15 17:07, John C Klensin wrote: > However, > we shouldn't make arguments for good-quality link encryption > that have the effect of convincing people (even the fairly > naive) that it makes either end-to-end content encryption or > relay server hardening unnecessary or undesirable. We should make arguments for use of TLS in mail. Deploying that provides real security and privacy benefits. And there are real improvements happening today in terms of deploying TLS in mail. I say encourage that as much as possible. For the niches where PGP or SMIME is usable, we should of course also promote use of those technologies *in addition to* TLS for securing mail transport. That is very much "in addition to" and not "versus." IOW, we should promote use of mail transport security everywhere and of PGP and SMIME anywhere those can be used. We separately need to work on providing much more widely usable end-to-end security for email. Neither PGP nor SMIME have worked well enough to get widely deployed and we should recognise that fact. And one of today's most common kinds of MUA (web mail) was never considered in the design of PGP or SMIME, and the need to support such MUAs breaks or almost breaks any e2e security one gets with our current standard e2e email security protocols. We cannot therefore credibly argue for widespread deployment of end-to-end security for email today. I wish that were not the case, but it is the case. So "don't promote TLS in case that slows deployment of PGP or SMIME" is not a good argument - the dichotomy is false as the wide deployment of PGP or SMIME providing e2e security is not possible. We have a (sadly quiescent) mailing list [1] for discussion of new end-to-end email security. I'd love to see discussions there as to how to improve the e2e situation. But I would if "fix e2e email security" was ever seen as a precursor to better deployment of mail transport security. That'd be entirely counter-productive. While it is sometimes understandable that folks make the error of arguing for the perfect and that being the enemy of the good, I really don't want to see us argue for the unusable as the enemy of the good. Cheers, S. [1] https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/endymail