Please El Reg stop carrying crap from Bloor Research. If they are paying you to do so, tell me which adds to click and I'll happily click a hundred!

Complete encryption is possible and can be made mandatory using public & private key pairs. However, the encryption must happen as the e-mail is written so you can't "snoop" the contents on the way otherwise it wouldn't be encrypted! And, of course, any partners need to have the public key of the person sending it in order to be able to read it. Distributing and installing the keys would be more of a challenge but not insurmountable: the number of business contacts anyone has probably doesn't change that much. But this is much more about teaching people about security than technology. And that is where the whole project fails.