Kirill Ponazdyr swinog@codeangels.com 2006-09-16:
The subject says it all: do you know which providers support TLS (the technology formerly known as SSL) for SMTP, POP and/or IMAP for their residential or small-office dialup/broadband customers?
TLS for SMTP makes no sence since this will only protect your message enroute from your machine to SMTP server but after that it is all open again.
Of course TLS does not offer end to end security like S/MIME and PGP do, but still there are plenty of reasons for supporting TLS:
* Protection of SMTP AUTH credentials, especially when using insecure auth methods
* TLS between MTAs requires no action on behalf of end users and still offers additional protection compared to no TLS, while TLS between MUA and MSA/MTA is still a lot easier to set up for customers than S/MIME or PGP
* Given todays many open or insecure wireless networks, TLS on the first hop (MUA <-> MSA/MTA) helps to better protect messages when they are most vulnerable -- it seems to be considerably more difficult for third parties to read messages in transit between MTAs than to read messages on the first (or last) hop on wifi or shared / public access networks
* TLS protects the RFC 2822 headers and RFC 2821 envelope too, which S/MIME and PGP cannot