I think this point has been made in some way or another in the thread, but I want to try to restate it. Suppose Alice (alice@gmail.com) emails Bob (bob@yahoo.c

I think this point has been made in some way or another in the thread, but I want to try to restate it. Suppose Alice (alice@gmail.com) emails Bob (bob@yahoo.com). If Alice sends Bob an email without PGP encryption, the text of those emails is stored on both Google's and Yahoo's servers, allowing either of those companies to read the email (or a government if served with a subpoena, or others -- possibly the general public -- in the event of a data breach). This is true regardless of whether it was sent with TLS at every point in the chain. On the other hand, if Alice uses PGP to actually encrypt the text of the email with Bob's and her public key, nobody except Alice and Bob themselves (not even Yahoo or Google, who have the message stored on their servers) can read the message. It's an important distinction -- as major consumer messaging products like Apple's iMessage, WhatsApp, etc. have recently started to implement this end-to-end encryption where even the company themselves are unable to read the message their users are sending, the FBI and other federal agencies have started to actually complain about their newly limited ability to spy, unlike when only TLS was used and they could just serve an NSL to Apple/Google/etc. to make them give up your message without your knowledge (with their only other option being shutting down their business, more or less).