What does your e-mail tell your ISP about you?

“Our philosophy is to rather focus our effort on servicing our customers and providing opinion that would directly benefit them,” Hetzner said.
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That's a clear "Yes, we store more than people would like to think" in my books.
 
At least Laurie and Derek were forthcoming.
And what they're storing is not suprising.
But the stoney silence from the rest is concerning.

Gmail people, Gmail.
 
xrapidx said:
Well... Gmail definitely store your email.
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Yip.
But for local authorities to get anything out of them would take years.

Not as if I have anything nefarious to hide - just allows me some breathing room wrt the size of my tinfoil hat in the cupboard :p
 
And this is precisely why I have my own mail server, and use mail systems that are based outside of this country so the ECT Act does not apply to them.
 
The IT guy at our firm stated right at the outset (11 years ago) that it was essential that the mail server is in-house and well protected from intrusion.

What I want to know is that if you own your own domain, are the email records kept by your ISP? I asked Openweb about that and got an ambiguous reply.
 
Email is the tip of the iceberg... many more collect much more than you or I care to believe.
 
Logs are not actual email. Just like a record of phone calls are not the actual call data. Gmail is a post office and thus would keep the actual mail and probably, being Google, the logs too.
 
ToxicBunny said:
And this is precisely why I have my own mail server, and use mail systems that are based outside of this country so the ECT Act does not apply to them.
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Ditto that, I use Google Apps for my personal domain.

SA legislation (mainly RICA and the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act) allows king Zumatello's corrupt cANCer jackboots access to info that they have undoubtedly been using for their personal enrichment: using info normally only available to insiders would surely explain some of the cANCer's millionaires/billionaires.
 
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bekdik said:
Logs are not actual email. Just like a record of phone calls are not the actual call data. Gmail is a post office and thus would keep the actual mail and probably, being Google, the logs too.
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indeed.. mail servers like exim etc. keep logs of incoming/outgoing - these logs help quite a bit when you get clients who claim their email is not working. eg - some spam trying to be delivered:

2013-03-24 04:08:07 SMTP connection from [75.137.69.243]:3770 (TCP/IP connection count = 1)
2013-03-24 04:08:08 H=75-137-69-243.dhcp.mtgm.al.charter.com [75.137.69.243]:3770 Warning: Sender ra
te 1.0 / 1h
2013-03-24 04:08:08 H=75-137-69-243.dhcp.mtgm.al.charter.com [75.137.69.243]:3770 F=<ops_invoice@adp
.com> rejected RCPT <madelynnn@REMOVED>: No Such User Here"
2013-03-24 04:08:08 H=75-137-69-243.dhcp.mtgm.al.charter.com [75.137.69.243]:3770 Warning: "Detected
session with all messages failed"
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I wouldnt be too concerned with something like that being stored.. its quite normal.
 
I work for a small ISP and we push about 100 000 emails through a day. There is no way we would archive that, you guys don't have anything *at the moment* to worry about :)
 
Grep said:
I work for a small ISP and we push about 100 000 emails through a day. There is no way we would archive that, you guys don't have anything *at the moment* to worry about :)
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Have worked for my share of ISPs and yes, for the moment there is nothing to worry about, but if you can store things outside of the countries jurisdiction, it just makes it harder in the future if they do want to get some data or require the ISPs to store logs of all email...

Though honestly, if that does become reality then things like PGP will become standard and my email will just get encrypted so the storage will just be of random data that they won't be able to decipher.
 
Grep said:
I work for a small ISP and we push about 100 000 emails through a day. There is no way we would archive that, you guys don't have anything *at the moment* to worry about :)
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I wrote an application for a large company that archives all email sent with a web front end for searching and retrieving the mail.

I think 100,000 would have been about 30gb a day, entirely possible
 
I think the potential is and has been there to spy for ages. You're more at risk via unsecured wireless points - that way people who actually want to steal info can do it easily. I'd be less concerned about your ISP and more concerned about how people transmit data. The fact that there are still so many unsecured SMTP servers out there is worrying. I did a high site survey one day and collected a bunch of packets only to discover my insurance provider was transmitting personal details from a nearby tower in plain text.
 
There are pros and cons to using your own domain and private servers to host your e-mail,
and there are pros and cons to using a service like Gmail.
But the one thing you should not be doing is using your ISP provided e-mail.
 
Sometimes all people need to do when they are paranoid is to go back to that "Terms of service" and "Privacy policy" and read through it to ensure they agree to whatever service level agreement they enter into with a service provider. I would definitely say most South Africans are too paranoid about anything related to online privacy. :twisted:

Most of the online services are being shutdown by DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyrights Act) which is US copyright law that is enforced by the FBI; most people in SA have not even heard about it, so I would recommend if you plan on spending long periods of time online, at least familiarize yourself with the basics of online privacy issues. :whistling:
 
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