> Who reads your email?
A lot of it ... not me!
Who reads your email?
11–16 of 16 posts
Re: Who reads your email?
#12It would be interesting to evaluate whether my nameserver provider (Cloudflare) or my mail provider (Fastmail) are sharing access to my emails with anyone else. I chose these providers because I don't want Google reading my emails. I assume that because it's a cleartext protocol and Fastmail operates in Australia that all of my emails are accessible in theory to state actors.
It is misleading to call email a plaintext protocol, because most email operations are encrypted in current practice (same as web browsing, despite HTTP 1 being a plaintext protocol).
SMTP (the delivery email protocol) began supporting encrypted transport in 2002, which means that for over a decade most email has been encrypted in transit [5] (as well as during retrieval, because of POPS/IMAPS and HTTPS-secured webmail). The method is TLS (same protocol used by HTTPS, all of our web browsing traffic). Competent mail servers and services, such as exim [1] and GMail [2], let you choose to abort delivery if the destination server does not support encryption (or, since you are concerned about state actors, if there's a STARTTLS-stripping server in the middle).
Furthermore, DANE [3] and TLSA [4] can be used (requiring DNSSEC to be set up for the domain) to bind a mail server record to a specific TLS certificate, further reducing meddling opportunities by state-level actors and allowing a "we do allow insecure mail delivery, but since this destination has DANE it is implied they have TLS and we will fail delivery if TLS cannot be established with this destination with the DANE-specified parameters".
[1] https://www.skytale.net/blog/archives/32-Outgoing-TLS-verifi...
[2] https://support.google.com/a/answer/2520500?hl=en
[3] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6698
[4] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7671
[5] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/04/winding-down-starttls-...
Re: Who reads your email?
#13It would be interesting to evaluate whether my nameserver provider (Cloudflare) or my mail provider (Fastmail) are sharing access to my emails with anyone else. I chose these providers because I don't want Google reading my emails. I assume that because it's a cleartext protocol and Fastmail operates in Australia that all of my emails are accessible in theory to state actors.
It is misleading to call email a plaintext protocol, because most email operations are encrypted in current practice (same as web browsing, despite HTTP 1 being a plaintext protocol). SMTP (the delivery email protocol) began supporting encrypted transport in 2002, which means that for over a decade most email has been encrypted in transit [5] (as well as during retrieval, because of POPS/IMAPS and HTTPS-secured webma…
I assume the person to whom you are replying was thinking more along the lines of end-to-end encryption. Email is very rarely end-to-end encrypted, and none of its standards relate to end-to-end encryption so you have to do it with other methods which are notoriously difficult to use correctly.
Re: Who reads your email?
#14An article from long ago about this problem:
https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/google-has-most-of-my-email-be...
Re: Who reads your email?
#15I run my own MTA for some 23+ years now. Google (supposedly) reads only my emails sent by their users and same can be said about other similar services. > The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) relies on MX records in the DNS to identify which server(s) it should hand the mail off to. Not necessarily (this statement is corrected later in the post). One of my domains have no MX records and I use it for email extensi…
> SMTP falls back to A (and AAAA which have not existed back then) when the FQDN does not have corresponding MX record
I think of it the other way around.
Originally, people would specifically say which computer it would be sent to when sending mail, right?
And then later came MX records.
So in my mind it’s like, ok send mail to this host, except if there are any MX records. If there are, then use those instead.
Re: Who reads your email?
#16I was speaking about Paypay in a gMail exchange yesterday and today saw an add about Paypay on my Smart TV (YouTube App). Weird coincidence. The first time ever that I have seen a Paypay ad on Youtube.
why do you think this is a coincidence? I thought there's nothing hidden that Google scans your conversations and targets you with ads.
And YouTube is part of Google portfolio... so nothing strange here