[liberationtech] NSA collects millions of e-mail address books globally

[Nick]

On Tue, Oct 15, 2013 at 11:49:46AM +0200, Moritz Bartl wrote:
> A self-hosted mail provider will obviously *not* help much against NSAs
> mass collection of emails and email addresses. Don't sell it as a
> "solution" in this context.

Well the article seems to be talking about "address books", as
opposed to just harvesting email addresses without context. The same
thing could be (and is being) done through metadata capture too, but
if I read the article correctly, the direct address book pillaging
(which may have extra useful metadata on contact networks compared to
collecting email headers over time) is something that using any
(secure) self-hosted provider (or local client) would defeat.

But as to your general point, I agree that hijacking every thread
with adverts for a project is certainly not an activity that is OK,
and is not the sort of behaviour that fills me with confidence about
said project.