Report: Comcast to encrypt emails

Comcast will begin encrypting emails within the coming weeks, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.

{mosads}Comcast is “very aggressive about” its encryption plans, and plans to begin broadly encrypting users’ emails “within a matter of weeks,” a company spokesman told the newspaper.

Comcast’s public commitment to email encryption comes after a Tuesday report from Google singling out the email services that do not support encryption between their email services and Google’s.

According to that report, Comcast supports encryption in less than 1 percent of emails sent from Google’s email service Gmail.

Overall, “approximately 40 to 50 percent of emails sent between Gmail and other email providers aren’t encrypted,” Brandon Long, tech leader of the Gmail delivery team, wrote in a blog post.

“The important thing is that both sides of an email exchange need to support encryption for it to work; Gmail can’t do it alone.”

Calls for broader encryption have grown since last year’s revelations about government surveillance — which included intercepting traffic from tech giants such as Google — by former government contractor Edward Snowden.