The overwhelming majority of email is in cleartext, and the overwhelming majority of email users vulnerable to phishing and impersonation, precisely because ema

The overwhelming majority of email is in cleartext, and the overwhelming majority of email users vulnerable to phishing and impersonation, precisely because email is an open federated standard. We wouldn't be having this conversation about email, because the prosecutor would have read it already. The laughably tiny adoption of GPG, and even TLS between SMTP servers for that matter, should make it abundantly clear that voluntary extensions aren't good enough. A federated system which respects peers' "freedom" to not react adequately to a changing threat profile is somewhere between irresponsible and actively malicious to its end-users. I, for one, celebrate the death of open standards like email in favor of mechanisms that can actually be improved (i.e. by forcing people to upgrade on pain of being locked out of the network) in response to new developments in security.