Ask Slashdot: What Country Has the Best Email Privacy Laws? 236
An anonymous reader writes "Given all that is going on with the ability of the government to go through my email if it is on a third-party server, I was wondering: what countries have the best privacy laws and what are some good hosts to use? I would rather pay a token fee to have secure private email than have members of the government able to read it as soon as it's 180 days old if I keep it at my email provider."
"...what countries have the best privacy laws..." (Score:4, Interesting)
Because we all know that all govenments can be trusted to respect such laws when their own interests are at stake.
If you have secrets that you must protect against goverments why are leaving them (unencrypted, evidently) on third party servers? And why are you discussing that fact on a public forum?
Re:Best email security laws? (Score:4, Interesting)
For email apply the same laws as for paper mails (Score:4, Interesting)
... at least in germany and most european countries.
If you want to read them you need a search warrant.
angel'o'sphere
Re:privacy laws won't fix a broken privacy model (Score:2, Interesting)
Since requiring TLS on my laptop to server connection I have found it is very common for hotel and airport ISP's to hijack the connection and route mail through their own servers. How did I find out? They don't support TLS so the connection fails. Then if you use runtbird to start thunderbird you can find the evidence. In future I will be using runtbird anyway to check if they are hijacking the connection and supporting TLS.
Example below from a Delta lounge in ATL:
0[192c140]: SMTP Connecting to: mail.mycompany.com
0[192c140]: SMTP entering state: 0
0[192c140]: SMTP Response: 220 mail.tmail.com ESMTP Xxx, xx Mar 2011 14:43:21 -0400
0[192c140]: SMTP entering state: 14
0[192c140]: SMTP Send: EHLO [10.241.1.242]
0[192c140]: SMTP entering state: 0
0[192c140]: SMTP Response: 250-mail.tmail.com Hello 242.1.241.10.in-addr.arpa [10.241.1.242], pleased to meet you
0[192c140]: SMTP entering state: 0
0[192c140]: SMTP Response: 250-ENHANCEDSTATUSCODES
0[192c140]: SMTP entering state: 0
0[192c140]: SMTP Response: 250-PIPELINING
0[192c140]: SMTP entering state: 0
0[192c140]: SMTP Response: 250 8BITMIME
0[192c140]: SMTP entering state: 4
0[192c140]: SMTP entering state: 21
0[192c140]: SMTP Send: QUIT
0[192c140]: SMTP entering state: 0
0[192c140]: SMTP entering state: 0
0[192c140]: SMTP Response: 221 2.0.0 mail.tmail.com Closing connection
0[192c140]: SMTP entering state: 11
0[192c140]: SMTP entering state: 12