Timeline for What steps do Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, and Hotmail take to prevent eavesdropping on email?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
10 events
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| Aug 23, 2011 at 21:53 | comment | added | Mike Samuel | @gowenfawr, Ah. In a large distributed company, that might involve multiple hops through nodes outside any corporate firewall so you have a weakest-link problem. | |
| Aug 23, 2011 at 21:49 | comment | added | gowenfawr | Other potential reasons for multiple mail hops include divisional mail routing (e.g., big companies, one domain, many sites and organizations), anti-SPAM services (e.g., Cloudmark, Postini), anti-SPAM and anti-Virus gateways (Barracuda). To see where your mail has been, look at the headers; there will be multiple "Received:" headers. Each time a mail server accepts a mail message, it adds its own "Received" header, so each one represents a hop, and you can see what servers (name and/or IP and sometimes software) touched your email. Some will also note if they used SSL for that hop. | |
| Aug 23, 2011 at 16:22 | history | edited | Mike Samuel | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Aug 23, 2011 at 16:22 | comment | added | Mike Samuel | @gowenfawr, thanks for explaining. The lack of encryption within Yahoo is less worrying than outside since there are fewer potential observers inside Yahoo's firewall. | |
| Aug 23, 2011 at 12:39 | comment | added | gowenfawr | Actually, it is common for more than 2 servers to be involved. I just reviewed 56 messages in my inbox: 7% had one "hop" (two servers), 18% had two hops, 57% had three hops, 2% had four hops, 4% had 5 hops, and 12% had 6 hops. One hop may represent client-to-SMTP-server, but the rest will be server-to-server. (The 6's are all Yahoo mail, which bounces around inside Yahoo using NNFMP before going out; I don't know but suspect that NNFMP doesn't support encryption). | |
| Aug 23, 2011 at 7:23 | comment | added | luben | Thank you for the answer! About the ecnryption - I was asking for the messages when they are sent by the mail server, not for the user interface which is used by end-users to check their inbox. It was valuable for me to understand that only 2 mail servers are involved. | |
| Aug 23, 2011 at 0:09 | history | edited | Mike Samuel | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Aug 22, 2011 at 23:03 | history | edited | Mike Samuel | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Aug 22, 2011 at 23:01 | comment | added | Rory Alsop♦ | +1 good separation of the two aspects. Pretty certain the answer to 1 is "Not by default, but all 3 will do this if required and both ends support it, and (where relevant) keys have been exchanged" | |
| Aug 22, 2011 at 22:52 | history | answered | Mike Samuel | CC BY-SA 3.0 |