it's interesting how secure email has been solved decades ago (how to do it) but making it accessible has been an ongoing struggle. :(
Anyone ran across a more tangible solution for the common man?
20 years ago when there was no better solution, PGP was great. But I think it's probably had its time in the spotlight and now the world has moved on, when it comes to using it to secure email.
I think the solution is that if you want to communicate in a secure manner, don't use email.
Even Media organisations have ditched it in favour of things like Securedrop (and/or Signal).
I'd argue that Signal is much more widely adopted that PGP ever was.
But the protocol has all the capabilities needed.
Nor is full support of every feature needed by every client.
I think from a crypto strength perspective, it,s silly to reinvent the same thing over again.
(The thing being basic PKI of just public/private keys and signed/encrypted messages.)
It's time is done though, for communicating between people. There are many better solutions where you don't need to worry about having the public key of every person you wish to communicate with. You no longer need to unlock your key every time you send a message to "prove" you sent it. The world has moved on to better technical solutions to those problems.
PGP was brilliant for its time. It still is brilliant for a number of uses cases (like verifying your Debian .deb file is signed by a legit Debian person)
However, communicating with people is no longer one of them. People HAVE invented/reinvented how to communicate securely. And the world's better for them having done so.