Take travelers, for example. Most that I’ve met don’t carry a laptop with them. They stop off at Internet cafes and use web-based email. They probably don’t want to spend a few minutes creating a new mail account on the email client running on the computer they’re using, only to have to make sure they clean up all the personal data before walking away.

I dispute your opinion that you cannot use webmail if you want security. So long as you connect over SSL, you’re more secure than the desktop email client users that connect over insecure IMAP or POP which, to be honest, is the majority of them.

As for dangerous, please explain. It’s early and I’m still waking up, but I can’t see the danger…

Cheers!

If you want security, you can’t use webmail.

Does freenigma send my mails to the freenigma server for encryption?

No. All mail is encrypted or decrypted directly in the webmail client (i.e. directly in the browser). But how does that work?! For the experts: when making an encryption request, the freenigma extension sends nothing more than the list of recipient addresses to the freenigma server. In response, it receives a random session key for symmetric encryption within the client as well as an asymmetric encrypted session key for all the recipients. AES encryption is then performed within the client using the unencrypted session key. Then, the user script in the client combines the symmetric encrypted mail text and the asymmetric encrypted session key to create the OpenPGP binary format.

Bummer.