Email cannot be encrypted at rest
&gt; at rest<p>So we&#x27;re talking about after it&#x27;s received and processed by a server.<p>&gt; Email is built on top of plain text protocols and messages flow in plain text. If you encrypt, you cannot scan for spam or viruses...<p>But you can? Just scan and process before encrypting.<p>&gt; ...index messages for searching<p>This indeed is a problem. Encrypting emails individually makes search difficult. Why not just encrypt entire hard drives? Encryption at rest is a very broad term.<p>&gt; or recover messages when a password gets lost. Not to mention the usability issues of changing passwords and encryption keys.<p>This has nothing to do with email. This is encryption in general, and these security details are a feature.<p>&gt; Some other providers automatically encrypt messages as they arrive using users’ public keys. That sounds exciting but in practice that means you cannot access your messages using the webmail unless you pasted your private key into a browser, and have it handled by script and a myriad of third party code. Ouch.<p>Huh? I haven&#x27;t heard of copy-pasting private keys. Use passwords. But more importantly, this is specific to webmail, not email in general.