Saturday, August 27, 2011

Email privacy

Note the email address to your left. Yahoo is forcing me to accept their "new" email interface and their new terms of service -- which will give them the right to read my mail. No no no. Can readers suggest an alternative free service that has a little more respect for privacy? (Not Google, please.)

8 comments:

Seymour blogger said...

Don't worry about the privacy thing because anyone can do it anyway. Good hackers can do it in a heartbeat. Spyware on you will allow it too. And the thing is you can never know when they are doing it unless you go to a good IT person and have them check for you. Find yourself a friend who is a good IT person and ask questions.

prowlerzee said...

Interesting question...I haven't used my yahoo in a while because they were asking me to agree to updates, too. I didn't care about privacy, but was annoyed to be pestered with change. I just did a quick search and saw some companies offering "encrypted" email...but read another article which said we should think of emails as postcards...quick and convenient, but not private.

Joseph Cannon said...

Seymour, you may be correct. But I am not going to AGREE IN WRITING to the principle of allowing others to read my email.

In the immortal words of Dana Carvey as Poppy Bush: Nah gah dah-ah.

John Myste said...

I recommend your own mail server (which I don't think is that difficult to set up).

I have no idea how to set it up. Seems really hard. I don't think it is, though.

Another suggestion would be to not use email for anything sensitive.

I suspect Yahoo is doesn't have the staff to read everyone's email anyway.

They are a bunch of Yahoo's.

Joseph Cannon said...

John, I'm not THAT paranoid. I don't think that Yahoo is interested in reading my mail for any reason other than advertising.

But the principle of the thing is important. I can't sign such an agreement.

Jotman said...

https://riseup.net/

b said...

Worth checking out dreamhost.com. It won't be free, and I don't know whether they offer a mailserver-only option, but they're good in the sense that they won't take a site down unless they get an order signed by a US judge. Not that that was what you were asking!

Anonymous said...

-> Sorry, its in the SIXTH paragraf.