I spotted the item titled “Engaging Newbies In Email Encryption and Network Privacy” on slashdot.org (21-8-2015) and thought, yes I am interested in that.
This took me to : http://code.tutsplus.com/tutorials/its-time-to-encrypt-your-email–cms-23719

That’s about as far as I got. The article was a basic introduction to why but didn’t lead to any “how to”.

I use Thunderbird for email and have installed Enigmail. But there’s a really big problem for us simple folks who don’t want to spend weeks learning about the technicalities and getting it working.

It only handles small simple text (non-html) emails without throwing up warning messages and re-wrapping lines.

This is a huge PITA and useless for everyday use. The warning messages are poorly written, don’t make sense and don’t offer solutions. The only option is to turn encryption and signing off.

If you do proceed and send the message, the result is an email conversation with seriously messed up formatting.

Why the F^%K, can’t it just take the body of the email, html, text, images, whatever and encrypt it ?
Then decrypt it at the other end and display it as was originally intended.

I suspect most of the reason is that this encryption, although technically complex is managed and presented to users by technical boffin types who are not interested in it’s application by normal folks. ie. if you need html email support you are not worthy of security or our time.

This is a problem because it keeps basic security out of the hands of the majority. It also limits the growth and distribution of the projects behind the security. It probably suits the authorities quite well.

I put this comment here largely for my for future reference, and because, I don’t participate in slashdot discussion (too many idiots) and there was no obvious way to contact the author of the article, Jeff Reifman.