Binding Social Identity with Email Address and Automating Email Certificate Issuance

End-to-end encrypted secure email remains a largely unsolved problem, from an adoption and deployment viewpoint. In this thesis, we propose a solution that can address two of the main challenges. Our solution involves: 1) Automated issuance and distribution of public-key certificates for use in email applications; 2) a means to make public keys of one user accessible to other users, in a manner that allows a cross-check of their authenticity. We use Keybase, a publicly accessible key database and key trust protocol, to bind a user's social identities to their email addresses. This enables other users to manually verify the social identity of their intended recipient in order to gain trust in their public keys. We also make use of ACME protocol used by an organization called Let's Encrypt for automated certificate issuance.