Actually it will be more difficult for governments to control all of the small businesses using their own encryption. Especially if encryption will be obfuscated.

Although I'm working with cryptography, I must admit there are a lot of technical ways to circumvent it, the cryptography will only help to rise the cost of those technical ways. And to be really secure, you must have special computers in special rooms in addition to using cryptography.

My experience shows that unfortunately most people are not interested in their privacy. You'll have to find a lot of enthusiasts to implement to build your own ISP.

Usually I think that it's too complicate to configure for an average user and it's a show stopper for most of them.

Me too:


FormPers
and some examples how it works

You can try http://www.playframework.org/ it doesn't require getters and setters, and for a Java framework it's quite cool.

What about a p2p software, which will be free and run on your computer?

Yes, I agree with you, but what I was saying is that if you have enough resources you can often get around encryption and also it doesn't mean that we should make eavesdroppers work easier by not encrypting.

Actually the hes right, if you have 50 billion dollars to spend there are other methods to eavesdrop you, like installing microphones and cameras in your place.
But encryption makes it much more expensive for government to eavesdrop on all it's citizens and vice-versa not using encryption in all of your communications makes it very easy for powerful entities (corporations, governments etc.) to monitor you.

When I tell people that webmail is insecure by design (with the exception when you're using it for your own domain name) they usually are surprised by it.

Not yet, I think it should get through few new versions, look how it will behave in real life, fix possible fundamental problems if found and then submit to IETF.

Switch to an alternative system, don't use e-mail - it's outdated :-)

Actually for these purposes it will be best to switch to a system which is simple and where encryption can not be switched off, this way once you've installed that system to your friend you tell them that they can contact you only through that system and so there are chances that they will start using that system to communicate with other people.

Actually standard encryption is very difficult to use for most not IT people.
I've tried to solve it in ResoMail, it only requires you to install the soft (ResoMail client) and to know your e-mail address and activation key, it's like an one time password which allow your public key to be automatically signed by domain owner key. Everything is done under the hood, client automatically sends public key to the server, server sends it to domain owner, domain owner daemon automatically signs it and sends it back to server and server sends it back to client.
Now it's in beta stage, you can request a free domain name install the server and play with it.