The answer is to increase security by having widely adopted imperfect security rather than supposedly perfect but also imperfect[0] security with marginal adopt

The answer is to increase security by having widely adopted imperfect security rather than supposedly perfect but also imperfect[0] security with marginal adoption. Having a secure initial message exchange is difficult and will always be difficult. Traditional GPG UIs are so obsessed with trying to solve that problem that they ignore the 99% case, in which something like trust-on-first-use is perfectly fine. The fact is, on average, users will be much safer with a TOFU scheme without any key servers or web of trust at all, as long as that scheme is sufficiently unobtrusive so that it actually manages to get adopted. The sad truth is that I actually use a mail client with GPG support, but I basically never exchange encrypted email for two reasons: It's not automatic, and the vast majority of users don't have GPG support installed anyway - and I'm not going to push others towards using encrypted email as long as it's harder than "install this plugin and you're done". I have other causes to spend mental energy on. [0] See other threads about problems with fake keys in the web of trust.