Google announced that the “End-to-End” email browser extension project it started three years ago is no longer a “Google project,” and that the community is invited to take it over because the project “has left the nest.” The company also renamed the End-to-End project “E2EMail.”
Back in 2014, Google announced the OpenPGP-based End-to-End project to bring easier to use end-to-end encryption to Gmail and other email services. Yahoo later joined the project as well, but eventually abandoned it, probably for different reasons.
Google started the project to win back the trust of Gmail users, after being accused of being part of the NSA PRISM program, and to show that it cares about its users’ privacy. End-to-end encryption would make email readable only to the users sending each other emails, but not to Google, as it is now the case.