Until the recent revelations about the NSA, we also believed (perhaps naively) that the U.S. had data protection laws that prohibited spying on citizens without a warrant. It may be just a matter of time before we find out that Germany has murky laws and secret courts that disregard fundamental legal principles just like the U.S. does, or that the German intelligence agencies work closely with the NSA. So if I really wanted secure e-mail, the only thing I could really trust at this point would be to encrypt my message on my own machine using a transparent, open source program like PGP. Once you rely on a third party to encrypt your e-mail for you (or even to provide you with encryption software), you're vulnerable to their being strong-armed by a government to give up your data.

> Until the recent revelations about the NSA, we also believed (perhaps naively) that the U.S. had data protection laws that prohibited spying on citizens without a warrant.

If people believed that email that a person didn't host themselves was protected, it was only because they were lazy and didn't so much as Google the laws in question.

The reason we keep telling you that the NSA behavior is probably legal isn't because we want it to be legal, it's because we want you to stop living in a fantasyland ;). Look at ECPA for instance, it's been around since 1986. CALEA has been around since 1994.

You are right in that this Telekom solution does not allow for truly secure communication. However, it does prevent men in the middle from snooping on your emails, which is a step in the right direction.