Encrypted email.
Discussion
Not all providers support it.
Context: mainly you can't make sure how the reciever's email server handle your sent emails. It might support pgp or might not.
So your best guess can be to password protect the email content, and send the password on a different channel. Or you are fully restricted to send to users of known email servers.
Encrypted the text. The recipient decrypts it.
All this password talk is a tangent.
I think PGP and asymmetric encryption is nice. (Also not too deep in cryptography)
My main problem with PGP is it requires a keypair from the receiving side. It is not a big deal, though how do you start a communication with a partner who has no keypair? It seems easier to send them a password on a different channel. Then to get them setup PGP on their side....
True that doing it via PGP would be more secure as in theory, only they have their private key.
What do I miss?
Also we might have different views on what "does not support" mean. Even a notepad supports encryption, I can just write the encrypted text in it. What I meant with not supporting is, I would have to use a separate extension to encrypt my gmail emails e.g. I could send them. Gmail could not read them, but I need extra steps to use it. This is what "does not support" mean to me.
Very fair
Also re: "how do you start with someone" - agreed that's the perennial problem. Keyservers are one unideal solution. The other is people doing things like this: https://vinneycavallo.com/contact
And a third is networks like Nostr, Bitcoin, and other crypto networks (.eth, ie) where people associate their identities with public keys.
True! I was also thinking about either nostr could be a good keystore, or directly if you make encrypted nostr mailboxes, you could get the discoveribility, and identities would be the keys. So you don't have to match an identity to a key. Also can have downsides, but could be an interesting concept.
I'm talking about PGP encrypting a message body and attaching the public key. Old school style. Every provider supports this, it's just plain cyphertext.
Thanks for pointing out. So everyone has pgp keys already so you can use their public key to encrypt an email for them?
Unfortunately no. That's what providers like Proton are good for (doing this for you). But ideally all people would be able to use GPG/PGP. Of course that's a lot to ask (hence e2e encrypted providers like the aforementioned)