It will see only encrypted messages anyway.
... and metadata.
True, that. It's a problem of most e-mail communications - you can encrypt the message body but not things like the recipient's address, the subject line, the date and so on. If having that stuff visible is a problem, there
are solutions to it (anonymous remailers, etc.) but they are an even bigger hassle than simple e-mail encryption. So, to re-iterate, if you want transparent, secure e-mail that can be used by anybody easily, you are simply out of luck.
GnuPG (same as PGP) is independent of the provider you use.
GnuPG is most adamantly
not the same as PGP. GnuPG is a humongous, buggy, incomprehensible, incompatible pile of horse manure. Chances are, you won't be even able to compile it on your average Windows machine, while PGP will compile on just about everything that has a C compiler (probably even on a smartphone) and you can understand how it works in about an afternoon.
While GnuPG will understand anything PGP can output (because, you know, PGP is compatible and stuff), the output of GnuPG is often incompatible with PGP (and I mean - impossible to make compatible) and in other cases it is simply too cumbersome to use when communicating with a PGP user. Here it is in more detail:
The good:
- Anything PGP produces, GnuPG can handle (although it will complain about some things when processing them).
- Symmetric encryption, asymmetric encryption-only, clearsigning and detached signatures produced by GnuPG can be made understandable by PGP, although you are forced to use weird options in GnuPG, like --pgp2, --rfc1991, --cipher-algo, --digest-algo, --compress-algo, etc., etc.
The bad:
- encrypting a message with asymmetric encryption
and signing it in a way understandable by PGP 2.x involves invoking
five separate commands (I kid you not), 4 of which are GnuPG invocations and one is a file copying command. And if you are a *nix aficionado, don't even think about using GnuPG as a filter to have all these commands on a single line - PGP wouldn't be able to understand the result, because GnuPG is too lazy to put there some needed information like the size of the compressed packet.
The ugly:
- There is no way (as in no f*king way!) of only signing a binary message (clearsigning and detached signatures are fine) with GnuPG in a way that would be understandable by PGP 2.x. This is because the signing of GnuPG follows the OpenPGP standard and not the RFC1991 standard that PGP 2.x uses. Yeah, even if you use the --rfc1991 option of GnuPG, that won't result in PGP-compatible output. In fact, the result won't be compatible even with GnuPG itself.
So, if you have to communicate with a PGP user, forget the GnuPG crap. If such a compatibility is not an issue, GnuPG is fine.
Encryption can not be provided by a remote server in a meaningfull way. What are you talking about here?
Somebody above suggested MyKolab as a solution to the OP problem. I explained why it is not. I fully agree that you must not trust the e-mail server to do the encryption for you and you should do it on your own machine. Once you do that, what e-mail service you use is irrelevant.
8) Posteo is some German-language crap without even an English user interface. My knowledge of German is limited but it seems to be yet another "trust me" service.
I like that you think something is crap when you dont understand a word about it, makes you look like a very intelligent person.
If you don't read carefully what other people write, that doesn't make you look like a very intelligent person.
Nowhere did I say that Posteo is crap
because it is in German. I said that it is German-language crap.
To begin with, any site that aspires to international business
must have an English-language interface. The fact that this site does not tells you how professional its owners are.
That aside, my knowledge of German, while limited, is not non-existent. I did skim through their description. Nowhere did I see a clear and unambiguous explanation of how exactly they ensure the security of the e-mail service they offer. It is certainly possible that I have missed it because of my limited knowledge of German. But if it is indeed absent, it tells you even more about how "trustworthy" the service is.
That said, I readily admit that my own requirements for e-mail security are probably too strict for the average person. For instance, it is well-known that Snowden used the now-defunct Lavabit - while I would have never trusted such a service.