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One point about privacy: E-mail is unencrypted and is delivered over public networks.

Assume that any government, be it your own, US or other will read your email if they so please, and encrypt anything you don't want them to read.

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This trumps all the other privacy arguments. If the government wants to read your email, it need not access it at the endpoints -- it already has access to it in transmission over the compromised backbone. You would need to encrypt your emails to avoid this.

Someone I know once told me crypto is funny because all you have to do is compromise the OS's socket implementation.

How so? The application does the encryption, not the OS.

Is that before or after you write a gui interface using visual basic to track an IP address? :/

To be fair, this is a guy who does hardened, embedded RTOSes. In the normal world implementation, of course crypto matters.

Sometimes I need to take off my "all software sucks and I hate everything" hat before posting :-/

Which is why it baffles me that so few people use S/MIME--other than the trending preference for webmail which isn't well suited for encryption. S/MIME is simple to setup on most email clients, and offers encryption of the body of the mail if the recipient is uses S/MIME as well. There are several of us at work that send encrypted emails all the time.

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