Email Security Protocols

David Strom explains three email protocols for keeping an enterprise email server secure: DMARC, SPF, and DKIM .

-DD

Personal Email

Jonathan Rees suggests that academic faculty should maintain (and use) an email account separate from their University. A university can monitor or close a faculty member's email account at any time, so a private account for private email is a wise investment of time.

-DD

Email Privacy Techniques

Colin Neagle suggests ways ISIS may be sending concealed messages to its operatives around the world using everyday technology.

-DD

Email Privacy

Lucian Constantin reports that an addition to the protocol underlying email has been developed to verify that a specific address has been registered to the same entity since a specific date. This protocol revision has been submitted to the Internet Engineering Task Force, and is being undertaken because some email services are recycling email addresses. This is a source of confusion when some Web services use email addresses as usernames, and some agencies send confidential information to email addresses.

-DD

Email Privacy

Jake New reports that "Harvard’s Search of Staff E-Mail Sparks Questions About Policies Nationwide. He reports that legal opinion confirms that an employer has a right (perhaps even a responsibility) to review the use of its coporate network. The article then discusses the Freedom of Information Act, which requires that information maintained by public employers, including public universities, be released to members of the public upon request, unless exempted by laws such as the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.

-DD

Government Considers Email Private 180 Days

Electronic Frontier Foundation Civil Liberties Director Jennifer Granick was cited in Nancy Gohring's August 6, 2009 ComputerWorld column regarding the government's view of the privacy of personal email:

The EFF argues that as with a letter or a phone call, the content of an e-mail should be protected. "The government argues different," she said. The government believes that if you've opened an e-mail and left it on the server, they can access it without a warrant. In addition, if a user leaves an e-mail on a server for more than 180 days, officials don't need a warrant to retrieve it.


But the reasoning behind that policy, set in the 1986 act, is antiquated, she said. "The theory is, in 1986 if you left something lying around that long it was like garbage, it wasn't important to you. Now we know that with Gmail and cheap storage it's quite the opposite. You keep stuff that's important to you and throw away what's not," she said.

-D.D.