How to get people to enable signed/encrypted email???

General Discussion (off topic) Anything and everyt
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I’m new to using s/mime for email. Only just recently acquired my first s/mime certificate. (Thank you Comodo!) My problem is that apart from some Linux mailing lists contacts, I don’t know anybody willing to bother installing either an s/mime cert, nor an pgp key so that they can sign/verify and/or encrypt/decrypt their email.

Some time ago I tried to convince some extended family members that they should get pgp for that. The ones that didn’t just think I was being paranoid, don’t do email at all…

I’d like to try again. But they all know I find Linux easier to deal with than Windows. So when I try to tell them that getting my free Comodo s/mime certificate was painlessly easy. And that it’s not very hard to install such an s/mime certificate to an email client. Or that once that’s done it’s as easy to use as it is to attach a photo… Well lets just say I expect them to roll their eyes. and pretend to “humor” me with remarks like “maybe someday”… Yeah right! :sigh:

But since they won’t bother to get neither an s/mime certificate nor an pgp key, the closest I can come to sending an secure message about my sister’s health to my niece who lives on the other side of the country is probably to put it in a so-called “private” Facebook message. Of course she probably has Facebook configured to send her a copy via a non-secure email notification…

And the local businesses I deal with are no better. Either they don’t do email, Or if they do, it’s insecure. Unless they use a web feedback form for that.

So like the Subject says: How can I convince people to get either an s/mime certificate or an pgp key so I can safely send them email with sensitive, or private information???

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JtWdyP

2

How can I convince people to get either an s/mime certificate or an pgp key so I can safely send them email with sensitive, or private information???
The easy answer is, you can’t. People will remain so lazy to actually get someone’s pgp key or s/mime certificate - or will find it much difficult to do so.
However, the only way to develop people interest into actually using pgp/mime based solutions is to encourage them to check-out services like mailfence.com, scryptmail.com…as they are trying super hard to make things as easy/mobile as possible (without doing any security trade-off’s).

3

Certificates and messengers only protect your data from the network adapter. Certificates are used to secure your connection, yet, there are ways to circumvent failures, just to have someone willing to waste time searching.

Certificates to make sense on websites, on machines I have my doubts.

4

There is ongoing work to make PGP easier to use. It’s called End-To-End.

That work has been going on for at least two years now. 88)