Broken blue padlock and 'Send a unencrypted message...' are causing confusion/concerns among users

[lautriva]

Your use case

We are self-hosting a Matrix + Element instance and recently upgraded Element to 1.11.110

Some of our users got confused as to what "unencrypted" means in the "send a unencrypted message" placeholder and also about the blue padlock.

We cannot use E2EE in some rooms because some of our users are not tech-savy or are using browsers that don't store cookies and / or use private sessions (I respect their choice)

Those cases breaks e2ee preventing users seeing our messages after some time

We also have public rooms we don't enable encryption as it doesn't make sense for us.

E2EE encryption is not the same as completely unencrypted, if you can trust the server and TLS provides transport encryption - this is still encrypted and saying "(unencrypted)" isn't strictly true.

It would be nice to remove the blue padlock (and maybe the "unencrypted" part)
(ie. restore the behavior before 1.11.110)

or maybe to have a toggle in settings / or in config.json to prevent showing the broken padlock?

I know that would break the incentive to enforce users to use E2EE but there are legitimate uses cases where rooms without E2EE must be used and that didn't raise concerns before today

Have you considered any alternatives?

• Customize the client CSS to hide the padlock
  • But feels very dirty / hacky
• Use another web client instead of Element
  • But would require users to adapt to the new workflow / UI

Additional context

Note: Issue heavily inspired from element-hq/element-web#3628 because problem use-case is similar