Why can’t anyone invent secure e-mail that doesn’t require an advanced degree to use?
Part of the reason is that standards are still too lax or too numerous.
Corporate-wide key management is too onerous, making it difficult to make changes and keep your e-mail certificates in synch as staff comes and goes.
And while there are a few solid products to choose from, interoperability is still miserable and plenty of difficult implementation issues exist.
Most products assume that users only own one machine, making it harder to manage e-mail that originates from multiple PCs and multiple operating systems.
Yahoo, Microsoft and others have been working for several years on sender authentication with little to show for it.
Microsoft maintains a page on Sender ID, just one of the many competing attempts to take control over this situation. One simple solution is to put up a simple Web message form to send secure messages.
Far too many steps are involved to exchange secure messages. You still need to understand lots about public key infrastructure, certificate management and how your e-mail client works.
Until these issues are resolved, secure e-mail will continue to confound most of us.
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There are many systems out there, but none are simple to use. In order for a solution to be workable, it needs to have
An easy way to sync multiple machines
Mediocre to high level of encryption
Use existing standards for e-mail
Be open-source and free software
So the only thing missing is standards for secure e-mail, so that any secure e-mail client can open messages from any other secure e-mail client