Gmail will make it easier to send encrypted emails to anyone

In honor of its 21st anniversary, Gmail is announcing plans to make it much easier for companies in regulated industries to send end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) emails. The main goal is to allow corporate users to send E2EE messages to any recipient (regardless of which email service they use) in just a few clicks.

9to5Google writes about it.

How the feature will help companies

Previously, implementing such a feature required a lot of effort from IT departments, since the S/MIME (Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) protocol and other proprietary solutions were quite complex. Specialists had to obtain and administer certificates, deploy them for each user, and also agree on whether S/MIME was configured for the sender and recipient. In addition, it was necessary to exchange certificates before sending encrypted emails.

To take advantage of the simplified scheme, companies need to support Client Side Encryption (CSE) in the Workspace Enterprise Plus plan with the Assured Controls add-on. This encrypts emails with keys that are under the customer's control and do not reach Google's servers, increasing data privacy and security.

After setting up CSE, employees can simply click the lock icon when composing a new email. The compose window will turn blue, indicating that the message is encrypted. If the recipient uses Gmail (personal or corporate), the email will be automatically decrypted in their inbox and can be worked with in the familiar interface.

If the recipient has another email service, they will receive a link to view the email in a limited version of Gmail. To do this, a "guest" Google Workspace account is automatically created, where you can read and reply to such messages.

Starting today, companies are offered beta access to send E2EE emails to Gmail users within their own organization. In the coming weeks, the functionality will be expanded to all Gmail mailboxes, and later this year, it will be possible to send E2EE emails to any email service.

As a reminder, Google has added AI to Gmail search. It will be used to display the most relevant results faster.

We also wrote that Google plans to make a large-scale security update for 1.8 billion Gmail users. The company will gradually abandon SMS confirmations, replacing them with QR codes.