I can’t speak for him, but I think whenever moxie talks about encrypted mail/messengers he means E2EE. And the state of E2EE for email is not good. SMIME is har

I can’t speak for him, but I think whenever moxie talks about encrypted mail/messengers he means E2EE. And the state of E2EE for email is not good. SMIME is hard to set up for regular users (dearth of free certificates [0], lack of SMIMEA support [1]), PGP support is lacking out of the box in most mail clients. And maintaining your contacts’ keys is quite a nuisance, using key servers requires trust (I have no control over who submits keys in my name, revoking can be hard). Regardless of whether you go for SMIME or PGP you will always have to sync your private keys when you use more than one mail client (web mail especially is a problem). [0] Only one I know is Actalis, supporting catch-all is impossible with it and you need to request a new certificate every year but cannot request before it is expired. [1] I can’t set a SMIMEA record on Namecheap’s name servers. And mail client support seems hard to check.