I second your ideas about encryption. Also, thank you for all the
alternatives provided: that gives me a good drive to move away from the big
G!
However, I have noticed that it is really hard to make people understand that
encryption is important and even harder to make them use it.
So my problem is now that if I send an encrypted message to somebody, I'll
have to send them an unencrypted one explaining how to decrypt the former.
Most people just don't like going through all the process because they think
that "it's complicated". Also, most of the webmail services around don't have
encryption features and using e.g. GPG becomes painful.
Of course, it the email providers did something about that, encryption would
be seamless, but it seems that nobody is willing to do that.
I was confronted once with someone who could not receive my personal
information via clear email for security reasons and at the same time wasn't
able to get an encrypted message... a fax was OK though!
What happened, was that I spent most time arguing about whether encrypting an
email and eventually I gave up. For now, I sign my emails and that's it.
