> Some other providers automatically encrypt messages as they arrive using users’ public keys. That sounds exciting but in practice that means you cannot access

> Some other providers automatically encrypt messages as they arrive using users’ public keys. That sounds exciting but in practice that means you cannot access your messages using the webmail unless you pasted your private key into a browser, and have it handled by script and a myriad of third party code. Ouch. That sounds more like an E2E encrypted setup where the email is encrypted by the sender before sending it, and the webmail provider stores a passphrase-protected copy of the private key. In any case, I'm not sure why "third party code" is the problem here. Would they prefer that webmail providers write their own crypto code? Does that include TLS libraries? Perhaps they mean "code hosted on third party sites", in which case the reaction should be "Why does your site pull in code from third party hosts (and why don't you use Subresource Integrity hashes)?". That leaves just one possible legitimate complaint, which is that the webmail server can (selectively) serve malicious JavaScript to users. While that risk is about comparable to the risk of running a native client that periodically checks for updates and automatically installs them, I think that the malicious webapp scenario can be mitigated by something like the clever Bookmarklet Bootstrap trick[0]. That has some usability drawbacks, but those might be fixed by something like Hashlink[1]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17776456 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17776456 [1] https://github.com/w3c-ccg/hashlink https://github.com/w3c-ccg/hashlink