Mayayana
| >That's an interesting point. There may be some value | >in encryption, and some companies -- like Google and MS -- | >have been going through the motions of setting that up. | | Why do they have to set it up? Encrypting files is no big deal. | There's freeware that does a fine job of it. |

There are different uses of encryption. I think I remember reading that Google and MS were encrypting their webmail.

Some email is encrypted. Some is not. Some is optional. The main role of that is just to protect the content from sniffing or man-in-the-middle attacks as it goes between servers. That won't stop big companies from handing over your data to the NSA or to their business partners.

If you want to *really* encrypt email it needs to be dealt with on both ends.

It sounds like what you're talking about is encryption for files on Dropbox. Yes, you can use something like PGP on those. All I'm saying is that encryption is not a total solution to the problem of someone else holding your files in cloud services.