[liberationtech] Secure hosted mail

[EI8FDB]

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On 25 Feb 2012, at 17:48, John Graham-Cumming wrote:

> I'd be interested to hear opinions from the list in privacy aware and secure hosted email. 
> 
> Are there opinions about any of the services like Hushmail, Neomailbox, ... Looking to dump gmail. 


Hello John,

Firstly, congratulations for dumping GMail! Get all your mail out of there, delete the contents in there and never look back.

Can you define what you mean by "privacy aware and secure hosted"? What is important to you? I suspect GMail is secure hosting also, however I would not define it as (user) privacy aware.

What I understand by secure hosted e-mail would be a mail provider who keeps their mail servers in a secure and locked down state. Also offers you secure interaction with it (SSL, secure IMAP/POP/SMTP).

Also, a provider who will protect your privacy, not monitor traffic, not hold log files on mail transactions, and (if possible) minimise / not hand over mail / log files to law enforcement agencies.

I would not define privacy aware or secure hosting as spam filtering (although it would be useful). I have not found any commercial mail service who can/does all that.

My best advice would be to operate your own mailserver. This would give *you* 100% control over the server and contents, and location in the world. I understand that's not possible for everyone, as not everyone has the technical know how. A fixed IP on a (possibly business level required) DSL Internet connection for 3-4 mailboxes would be very possible.

My only other advice would be to use, and require everyone you communicate with to use strong PGP.

As an aside: Is there any public list "Top 10 countries who protect citizen privacy and their electronic data" list anywhere? It would be useful to know as hosting companies in these countries would (am I naieve?) provide better protection for services like these? 

As an example, in the 90s Switzerland was very good for hosting Internet radio stations..until they changed their laws and we had to move some stations from being hosted in Switzerland...

Sorry I can't provide you with any company name. Even the perceived super secure Hushmail has provided e-mail files to the law enforcement agencies. [1]

I hope that gives you some help.

Bernard

[1] http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2007/11/encrypted-e-mai/


=====
Bernard
www.ei8fdb.org

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