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You mean far, far easier to intercept? You used to be able to just stick a coil around the wires.
The main issue is just a lot of countries governments' don't trust computers still. In Germany they insist on fax and post as it's the only thing they can use as proof of signature in court, etc.
But it's government laws and regulation that is behind. It's not so much of a technical problem (although E2EE email standard would be nice!).
“Harder to intercept” as in you have to go outside where the grass is to play around with the telephone wires, as opposed to typey-typey in your mom’s basement. Ain’t nobody got time for that
It's the same though.
To intercept the email you need to be on a network that receives it (i.e. ISPs).
It being stored unencrypted is a totally different problem (and also for letters, faxes, etc.)
No. Government had nothing to do with it, these are separate issues. WhatsApp was never approved by the government, yet it's widely used and it has E2E. OTOH, German government accepts email for lots of things. I know of some public sectors requiring email with PGP even.
The actual problem is that both email and PGP are really bad. This on my opinion describes it very well: https://latacora.micro.blog/2019/07/16/the-pgp-problem.html https://latacora.micro.blog/2020/02/19/stop-using-encrypted.html
On top of that these days most phone calls are routed over the internet at some point too.
Well, how do you proof an email has been delivered if you don't get a confirmation? That's the main problem when going to court.
Yeah, this is a pain with faxes and letters too though - I had first-hand experience in Germany unfortunately.
Would be interesting to require read receipts to be on.
You can't without the logs from the recipient server.