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Where is Microsoft on email encryption?

Microsoft needs to play ‘catch up’ with email encryption.

Yahoo is going to join Google is supporting not just email encryption but the same type of email encryption.

Sadly we’ll have to wait until sometime in 2015 for Yahoo to release their version of OpenPGP.

That’s good news … but where is Microsoft?

For all their talk about security, Microsoft is being notable for not joining this move.

Outlook has support for encrypted email but it’s clumsy and hard to use. We’ve noted before that Gpg4Win for Outlook should work with the Google/Yahoo initiative. OpenPGP isn’t perfect but it’s the best candidate for an accepted standard.

Microsoft’s main push in email encryption is to re-brand their existing Information Rights Management and Azure service as Office 365 Message Encryption and sell it as a way to generate more money. That’s a limited and proprietary offering and no substitute for proper email encryption.

It seems we’ll have to wait until Microsoft realizes that they can’t sell their own technology and have to join the rest of the internet.

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