The intention of this isn't to be the most secure solution on the planet - you're not going to be using Gmail if that's the case.

Instead we wanted to build a starting point that was A) easy to use, and B) easy to extend.

Our initial plan was to use a GPG solution, but that introduced a lot of complexity to the UX and also had other security holes. But the main thing is that if something is too complicated, it's not going to be used by the broader masses - kind of like GPG right now.

With this solution only the sender has to have the extension installed to send an encrypted email.