A couple of months after the Snowden leaks few large german providers came to the remarkable idea that it would be a great to delivery emails using encrypted connections.
While many other providers have been using encrypted connection for eternities, these large providers started a publicity campaign and declared proudly to encrypt email traffic between themselves as of 2014. How can a provider be part of this circle? Simply get certified with costs of 9500 to 30.000 €.
They call it E-Mail made in Germany, other call it "Bullshit made in Germany".
Sources (all german):
Are you running an own mail servers? Just use DANE to secure your TLS connections for free.
Heartbleed