This is a never-ending debate, but you really shouldn't be doing E2EE for emails, and you really shouldn't be using it as a backbone for encrypted chat. There a

This is a never-ending debate, but you really shouldn't be doing E2EE for emails, and you really shouldn't be using it as a backbone for encrypted chat. There are just too many foot-guns. Other people more qualified than me can have that debate if they want, but that's the consensus I see from security people that I respect, and I think there reasoning is sound. I think Signal's derision towards federated protocols should be taken with a grain of salt, but email is genuinely kind of bad on multiple axes. It's difficult to encrypt well, the network is difficult to federate with as an independent user because of anti-spam measures, there's a lot of stuff that providers have kind of stapled on top of it to get around the problem of embedding remote images/resources, message verification, etc... there's just so much duck-taping over problems with the protocol. > If you skip this part, all e2ee you use is just a security theater. No, not at all. It's better if you take that step, but skipping it doesn't necessarily mean there are no benefits elsewhere. Proper E2EE does require verification, however, proper E2EE implementations only require additional verification for new devices, movement, etc... verifying something once, even verifying poorly once, is still a lot more secure than verifying it multiple times in a row. We can get into big debates about the technical side of E2EE, but the short version of that debate is that if E2EE didn't matter, attackers wouldn't be making as much of a big deal about it. This is a good general metric to use when thinking about privacy measures, whether that's sandboxing improvements in iOS, or DNS over HTTPS, or ESNI, or E2EE. If the primary attackers are freaking out about it, there's probably a reason for that. And all of them are freaking out over E2EE so unless you think this is some kind of giant coordinated conspiracy, probably the reason they're freaking out about it is because E2EE does make it harder to monitor people.