Interesting. But I notice that yet again you have to have some client software for ultimate protection.

Many organizations try to capture the secure-mail market. In Norway, the postal services have implementations of protocols similar to this one. Of course that is because of the smaller amounts of buisiness snail-mail, and trying to stay ahead of the market.

As far as I know, you have to have some client software also in their solution, to be able to use a good enough encryption algorithm. The mail is not sent directly to the reciever, but is bufferd in the postal office's server, so they can guarantee that the mail comes from the sender and is delivered to the reciever. The system is quite exciting, but not very easy to use at this point, because of you have to have the client software, and also a special e-mail address provided by the postal services.

The idea is to create a system that will be approved by the goverment to use with govermental documents, such as tax papers etc. Together with this, an implementation of electronic signatures is also under development. The idea is that when able to send important documents with e-mail, they could also be signed electronically. Perfect for signing contracts etc.

But there has to be a third party involved, and also client software. We know that to this date there is no fool-proof solution without this overhead.