Re: newbie question

[krymson () gmail com]

Props to Matt Davis. I'll build on his answer with some exposition. :)

While it might seem like SSL is the obvious answer, let's look at this further, especially with consideration if this 
is China as hypothesized by another responder.

China is in control of the ISPs as well as many (all?) of the "border" routers. This means that even SSL is not 
necessarily secure as all it would take to snoop on this would be a MITM attack for anything heading to gmail.

So what happens when you are not in control of the lines and equipment between yourself and your the external party? 
This ends up being similar to the problem posed a few weeks ago about stopping admins from sniffing an employee's 
traffic.

You need encryption whose key is not transmitted in MITM-vulnerable or reverse-engineerable form, much like PGP. It 
would be best that any email you get be transmitted to you via PGP. It will sit in your Gmail inbox PGP-encrypted. You 
can then download it as you wish, and decrypt it on your local system.

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