&gt; The use of unencrypted or encrypted link to the receiving email provider&#x27;s MX server doesn&#x27;t change all that much in terms of who can read the email: it&#x27;s still sitting in plaintext on the recipient&#x27;s server (as well as the sender&#x27;s server), and the group of actors who can sniff traffic on the backbone like that is probably just as easily able to get it from the servers.<p>That&#x27;s not at all obvious to me. And this sort of backbone sniffing is exactly what we&#x27;ve seen state actors do. What possible downside could rewarding link integrity have on the story for user privacy? A false sense of security? Quite the opposite: that&#x27;s what we already got in spades.